


MEMENTO MORI

by spicyshimmy



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-09
Updated: 2011-07-09
Packaged: 2017-10-21 05:14:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 33,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/221317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spicyshimmy/pseuds/spicyshimmy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written (as always!) in response to a prompt on the Dragon Age Kinkmeme. On one of his earlier escape attempts from the Circle, Anders makes it as far as Tevinter, but it's not the liberation he'd hoped for. Many years later, as part of Danarius's retinue, he meets up with the gang in Kirkwall during Act 3--but as a very different man. <i>Hawke often enjoyed exploration after a skirmish, to cool his blood by picking through a vanquished foe’s meaningless effects. There were times when Fenris permitted it as a personal indulgence, and times when, for whatever reason, he did not. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	MEMENTO MORI

Hawke often enjoyed exploration after a skirmish, to cool his blood by picking through a vanquished foe’s meaningless effects. There were times when Fenris permitted it as a personal indulgence, and times when, for whatever reason, he did not.

Or could not. There was a distinction to be made there.

But Fenris preferred that deflective scavenging to the promise of outright concern, which currently would have been all-too visible in the wreckage of the Hanged Man’s taproom. The members of the party did so enjoy idle speculation as their most unifying pastime.

‘A key,’ Hawke said, with an unavoidable jingle of the ring round his fingers. ‘And coins, of course; poultices, a rather embarrassing amount of lint. A good staff. Might fetch something worthwhile, if Varric can find any interested buyers.’

Ah. So _that_ was how it was going be. Fenris supposed he should have expected it—since Hawke was a man prone to feints and dodges, a strategy not always reserved for battle.

‘I’ll have to tell Corff not to let just anyone into the place, these days,’ Hawke added, straightening. He sidestepped the two smoldering corpses of rage demons, black streaks of sulfur marring the floorboards as they sank through the greaves of the wood. ‘But, you know me. Find a key, find the chest it opens. Or the door. Or the treasure-chamber. Preferably, a primeval thaig just _full_ of goodies.’

He cast one final glance over his shoulder. Fenris felt it like a lance. Then, Hawke took the steps to the second floor two by each, where other members of Danarius’s retinue had scattered as they fell, one by one.

Noise in the taproom would soon return to what it ought to be. The silence was unbearable for that reason alone. At Fenris’s side, Isabela shifted, suddenly very interested in the anatomy of her dagger.

Fenris sought a comment, something particular to this place. Isabela and anatomy, for example. For someone else, it would have been so easy.

But for Fenris it didn’t come at all, and Isabela resettled her weight with a pointed cough. ‘Not your sympathy, too,’ Fenris muttered, irritable. _That_ came easily, for whatever reason. Then again, he was used to the appearance of normality subsequent to unfathomable change. They all indulged in it, a bad habit they allowed in one another—likely in the hopes the favor would someday be returned.

‘Sympathy?’ Isabela snorted, then re-sheathed her blade. ‘Who said anything about sympathy? What _I_ want is a drink.’

Merrill followed her to the bar. Fenris knew what it meant that he’d fought one mage with another at his side. He also knew what it meant that Hawke was so pointedly absent, that Isabela was guiding Merrill out of the way, and supposed he should have been grateful that they’d acknowledge his assessment. He was alone. They believed him, and left him to it.

He was grateful for other reasons; less grateful for yet more reasons. In fact, there were too many reasons, a surplus of them, culminating in Danarius’s body on the floor, nothing more than a dead man, no longer _Danarius_ at all. Yet the uncertainty he’d brought with him was worse than the knowledge of his continued existence, his continued interest.

There was the possibility being betrayed by his own sister wasn’t as terrible as killing the one man he’d hated most.

Fenris flicked the blood off the length of his blade. Danarius’s blood—the same blood Danarius himself spilled, in order to cast his deplorable _magic_. The words he’d learned in his lessons with Hawke made it more difficult to grasp this feeling and hold onto it, not less so.

‘Fenris,’ Hawke called, from the second floor. The name stung, but only for a moment. Fenris stepped forward, moving past the well-stoked hearth and the not insignificant carnage. ‘I think you’d better come up here and see this.’

When Hawke said something like that, he usually never meant anything pleasant by it.

*

There was, Anders had determined, a fight going on outside. A very loud, very prolonged one. Not difficult to miss, really; he hoped it didn’t involve fire. There was a collar around his neck, just a simple thing, neither too heavy nor too tight; attached to that was a length of chain, itself wrapped unceremoniously around a nearby bedpost. It would have been very easy to walk over to the chain and lift it, even for a mage, but still, if the place did go up in flames, it would certainly have hindered his progress in jumping out a window or something to escape going up with it.

It certainly wasn’t there to prevent him from running away, if that was really what he wished. No; his own experiences were what did that, each linked to the next, and the one that came before it, and so on. Anders found he had no desire to get up, which of course was exactly what Danarius knew already.

He sat on the bed with his hands folded neatly in his lap, listening to the shouts, muted but still quite recognizable from the other side of the wall. Danarius had come here to fight someone—not exactly the most comfortable setting for a duel, but Anders had seen the man take on an Archon and his entire retinue in the streets of Minrathous. He didn’t seem to mind much either way where he killed someone, so long as he had the higher ground for it, and they didn’t return the favor.

If, rather than maintaining the higher ground, Danarius was the one to die, then Anders supposed he’d feel the same amount of very little as when he’d learned about Hadriana. He’d be left to someone else after that, who might be better, or who might be worse. Not that he had anything to do with it, but Anders privately hoped it wasn’t anyone with sores or troublesome digestive systems, or quick tempers, or violent pasts.

Then, he went back to studying the far wall, thoughtful crease in his brow, waiting for the shouting to be over.

Eventually, as with all unpleasant things, it stopped. He heard some talking, much softer, barely more than chatter, each word indistinct. He thought he heard some far-off laughter. He didn’t think he heard Danarius. The furrow in his brow creased deeper, but still, he waited, until footfalls passed the door and a key turned in the lock.

When the door opened, swinging inward, someone unfamiliar stood behind it. He had a very intriguing beard, and a smudge of what looked like blood across the bridge of his nose. He was jingling a key in his right hand.

Neither of them said anything to one another. Anders assumed it was up to this other person to begin; he seemed curious enough, as far as intruders went.

Finally, he understood his place, the same way Anders already understood his. ‘Fenris,’ he called, to someone down below, ‘I think you’d better come up here and see this.’

Something flickered in the recesses of Anders’s memory, a pale river-fish rising from the depths of murky waters. He knew that name. _Fenris_ had been one of Hadriana’s favorite playthings, and Danarius’s favorite slave, until the elf had finally managed what Anders never could: a successful escape.

And, if gossip and Danarius were to be believed, it was Fenris who was responsible for Hadriana’s death. Anders couldn’t think of a reason for his current master to lie about how his former one had died. It wasn’t that Danarius had ever been an honest man, but rather that he wouldn’t employ deceit when the truth could be so much more effective.

Anders turned his attention toward the creaking stairs, signifying the approach of _someone_ in the distance. He thought, firmly, of the details: Fenris had killed Hadriana, and now it seemed he’d been instrumental in Danarius’s downfall, too.

The bearded man lounged against the wall across the way, unconcerned by the thought of a slave seeking revenge for his master’s death.

He was right, but the assumption made Anders feel small, like a bit of clay rolled and rolled between someone’s hands, until it dried out and crumbled to nothing.

A narrow silhouette darkened the doorway; Anders heard the faint hum of lyrium, and felt the answering pulse of his magic in return. He knew Fenris only in passing—had even healed him a scattered handful of times after Hadriana’s games went too far. But all that was years ago.

Looking at him now, Anders supposed he must have found a new healer. Either that, or no one dared bait and tease him in the world outside the Imperium, where a man’s strength seemed to mean something beyond how long he’d last as a slave.

Fenris was lean and strong. His right gauntlet was drenched in dark blood, and there were crimson spatters staining the familiar pikes and blades of his peculiar armor. His expression was inscrutable as it ever had been: lip curled, dark brows narrowed to obscure all vulnerability with shadow in his eyes.

Anders kept his hands folded in his lap, eyes focused on Fenris’s chestpiece, neither looking _at_ him nor away from him. It was a difficult balance for a slave to strike, but a necessary one. Easier, that way, to give the appearance of paying attention without being outright rude.

As Fenris drew closer, Anders had no way of knowing whether a flash of recognition would cross his features. It had been years since they’d last seen one another, years since Danarius had returned from Seheron _without_ his prized bodyguard. Gossip spread. Fenris never returned. The ripples of his escape had passed through Minrathous for a time, before the waters stilled, just as they always did, to swallow his name up again.

‘Mage,’ Fenris growled. The years had done nothing to dull his tone. Anders pressed his hands more tightly together, blinking as he looked up—just to show them all he’d heard.

In one swift motion, Fenris raised his broadsword. The bearded man straightened, calling out in alarm. A tightness closed around Anders’s chest, his body swelling as his ribcage shrank, but he didn’t move. If this was to be the way of things, then at least it would be easier than making the long trip back to Tevinter, to be auctioned off with the rest of Danarius’s wares.

The sword came down with a flash of steel, and neatly sundered the chain fastening Anders to the bedpost. Anders’s right eye twitched. He allowed himself a moment’s curiosity—reaching over, fingering the metal where it had been sheared.

‘You are free,’ Fenris said. Without any further pronouncement—instructions, perhaps, or congratulations—he turned on his bare heel, to leave the way he’d come.

Anders smiled down at the chain in his hand. He stayed where he was.

News of Danarius’s death would travel as fast and as far as Fenris himself had, while he was on the run. Little scenes crossed Anders’s mind, half the remembrance of things past, half woven with imagination. Glittering ocean voyages, and the darkness of a forest at night. Camping by riverbeds, hiding in empty barns, sleeping near livestock with a pillow made of hay.

Soon enough, Danarius’s enemies—and he’d made so many, especially amongst the archons—would come to tie up all the loose ends. Anders included; Anders’s chain included.

There was no point in leaving.

The man with the beard coughed, politely, into his hand. Anders glanced toward him, then back down at his boots, soaked in blood, and a burn along one of his greaves—the faint smell of sulfur.

‘Fenris,’ the man said. ‘If I offer this one a job—a _job_ ; you’ve heard of that, surely—at my estate, will you lecture me in front of all our friends again?’

Fenris paused where he stood, already in the doorway with one hand on the frame, so willfully able to move on. Anders didn’t understand his posture, his ease of movement despite the tension in his shoulders—and told himself he was checking for no other reason than the potentiality of wounds.

‘ _No_ ,’ Fenris said at last. He left the room, and Hawke crossed deeper into it, more relaxed now that Fenris was gone.

There was something in that—a story for later, when the night fell and Anders was finally, completely alone. He’d learned so much about people by watching them, mostly terrible things, though sometimes there was wonder in the terror, some shining truth to be found. Danarius had actually been somewhat easy, at least compared to Hadriana; he lacked her bitterness, her frustration in loneliness, and made up for all the rest in power. Anders always fell short of analyzing _that_ , probably because he’d never had it, or the desire for it. Not in the same way.

‘You’ll have to forgive Fenris,’ the man said. He jingled his key one last time, then pocketed it; Anders suspected he was simply unable to let go. ‘He’s had something of a trying day. The whole bit with the sword—I’d imagine that must have come as quite a shock to you.’

Anders thought it might be inappropriate to call him master just yet. He nodded. It would have to do.

‘Ah,’ the man said. ‘You’re one of those quiet types. Well, to be perfectly honest, I don’t mind that in the slightest. It’s impossible to get a word in edgewise here, as you’ll soon discover. Do you want that collar off, by the way? I’m only asking because it might be a bit… _noticeable_ on the way to Hightown. Everyone knows the Champion’s eccentric, but I’m wondering if _this_ might not be pushing it too far.’

Anders had no preference. He held the chain in his hands. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘However you please.’

‘…So that’s how it’s going to be.’ The man leaned forward; he was comfortable with himself in a way Anders might once have known. He was comfortable with other people, too. He didn’t seem the type who had sores or a troublesome digestive system, though he _was_ covered in blood; that was never a positive sign in regards to tempers or violent pasts. He smelled, faintly, of dog. ‘Well, I’ll see what my house dwarf can do about this collar business. And if the denizens of Hightown feel all aflutter, I say it’s good for them.’

He gestured toward the door. At last, Anders felt comfortable standing.

They’d made it all the way down to the taproom when Anders saw Danarius; a bar-wench and a man in an apron were trying to roll him up into a tarp. The graying head lolled, eyes wide, body frozen tight in its final living gesture. A streak of bright red blood painted his mouth and throat, his parted teeth and heavy tongue.

‘Hope he wasn’t a friend of yours,’ the man said, guiding Anders away.

*

Hawke came to visit a week later. Fenris was drinking. This was always the way.

The fire crackled in the hearth, mostly untended to. Fenris didn’t need it, from the warmth of the drink to the warmth of the evening, but still, it provided just enough light to find the cork and flick it free of the bottle.

‘Fenris,’ Hawke said, making himself comfortable. ‘We need to talk.’

‘We are talking,’ Fenris replied.

‘Not really,’ Hawke pointed out. He leaned sideways on his bench, stoking the fire with a long iron poker Fenris had never bothered to use—though he supposed, in a pinch, it would serve as a weapon. ‘ _I’m_ talking. You seem to be carrying on a love affair with that wine. Rather rude to do that kind of thing in company, if you ask me.’

Fenris hadn’t asked, but he passed the bottle over to Hawke anyway, understanding after seven years the wordless cues the other man favored, and what they all meant. ‘It’s no Agreggio, but I find it…serviceable, nonetheless.’

He kept his eyes on Hawke as he drank, out of curiosity, and an ingrained wariness he’d never quite managed to shake. There was a reason for his appearance now, just as there always was. Occasionally, Hawke had a way of showing up right when Fenris _most_ needed someone to talk to, but he hadn’t been feeling that way today.

They’d already spoken about what happened with Danarius; Hawke had covered his obligations admirably on that end. But Fenris suspected he still wished to bring up _Varania_ , a topic Fenris was altogether keen to avoid.

He didn’t need his own thwarted hopes pushed back in his face—the reminder of everything he’d once wanted, and how it had all been laid to waste at his feet, along with Danarius’s corpse.

Hawke would assume that Fenris felt guilty over what had happened to Varania because _Hawke_ so clearly loved both his siblings. He could never understand what it would be like to have one betray him, not in this way.

Fenris’s fingers twitched. He wanted the wine back.

‘So,’ Hawke said, lips relinquishing the mouth of the bottle at last, ‘you’re really staying here? You don’t want to—I don’t know, see the world? Have an adventure? Live somewhere that _isn’t_ a moldering old mansion in the heart of Hightown?’

The points of Fenris’s finger-guards dug in sharply against his knees. _This topic again._ He’d had a similar discussion with Varric and Aveline a week ago, and so it seemed that everyone was trying to push him out of Kirkwall, now that his so-called business here was finally concluded.

‘I want to…enjoy my freedom,’ Fenris said. There was something about Hawke’s scrutiny that made him feel foolish, perennially the child in a world of men. ‘But I have no real understanding of how that’s done.’ After all, he’d sought a solution to his directionless nature, but Varania had seen it solely as an opportunity to improve her own lot. ‘My sister is dead, and I have nothing—not even an enemy.’

‘You know,’ Hawke said, taking the opportunity to lean forward. There were new shadows on his face, new wrinkles in his brow and at the corners of his eyes. The past three years had been especially difficult for him, but he bore them well enough. ‘It’s funny you should say that, Fenris, because _I_ just so happen to have something for you: your very own healer.’

Fenris blinked. Through the wine-dark daze he’d drunk himself into, Hawke’s meaning coalesced into something recognizable. ‘The mage?’ He could hear the harsh surprise in his own voice, and he knew there was nothing he could do about it. ‘ _Danarius’s_ mage?’

‘He’s a free man, now,’ Hawke pointed out. As though that was ever what mattered, when one had been a slave.

The mage had been Hadriana’s first; Fenris remembered him for his healing fire, and the bread hidden up his sleeve one summer, Hadriana thwarting Fenris’s meals for so long that even rising from his cell was a burden.

Now they’d been separated by too many years, and even that small kindness couldn’t make them more than strangers to each other. Just as Fenris hadn’t been able to bear the sight of Orana, he had no interest in _Anders_ , either.

The name was simple enough to remember. It, like the man who bore it, hadn’t been from the Imperium.

‘Look,’ Hawke said. ‘You probably can’t help but notice that—as the Champion of Kirkwall—I’ve been under a great deal of scrutiny lately.’

‘Varric’s fault, in part,’ Fenris said, still warily.

‘Don’t I know it.’ Hawke sighed. ‘But then, I’ve always been so fond of the bastard’s stories. I always tell myself I’ll put a stop to it this time, until one thing leads to another, and suddenly my reputation’s grown tenfold in a single night.’

‘Perhaps the pleasure you take in so much attention has something to do with your tendency to look the other way,’ Fenris said, and drank again.

Hawke chuckled warmly. ‘Oh, Fenris. Never stop. What would I do without _you_ to remind me of my many shortcomings?’ He reached forward to take the bottle, then paused when it was halfway to his mouth, fully aware that Fenris was watching him, and not just because of the drink he was about to steal. ‘No. It’s all completely beside the point. The truth of the matter is, Fenris, he’s twice as gloomy as Orana—if you can believe it—and I already have Sandal to terrify important heads of state when they come for supper. Besides which, I simply don’t understand him—bad for both of us, really—and I have no idea how to make him _less_ depressing, anyway. So I thought to myself, who do I know whose house is just as depressing as this poor bastard of a mage? Only one person came to mind,’ Hawke concluded, leaning back easily, and returning Fenris’s wine to its proper place—with Fenris.

The sleight of hand was noticeable. Hawke wasn’t losing his touch, but perhaps he was more tired than usual these days, unable to maintain his standard level of expertise. He was doing this for a reason—his little gifts always had some purpose—and Fenris narrowed his eyes, while Hawke looked, pointedly, innocent.

It was never possible to tell who Hawke thought he was helping, with any of his gestures. What Hawke thought and what he felt were often kept tenaciously separate.

‘In any case,’ Hawke said, tiring, as he always did, of accurate scrutiny, ‘he’s downstairs right now in your creepy foyer. I can’t imagine that’s pleasant for him, all alone, amidst the mushrooms you seem to be growing on your rug.’

Fenris stiffened. ‘What?’

‘I couldn’t leave him at home, now could I?’ Hawke explained. ‘That would be…too much like bartering, I think, and besides, there’s Sandal to consider. Quite frankly, the house is full up. A mabari and a dwarf enchantment expert and one ex-slave and Bodahn is really too much already. But you, by your own admission, have nothing. So it seems only fair, from where I’m standing.’

‘Hawke,’ Fenris said, in warning.

‘Anyway, I’d love to stay and chat a bit longer,’ Hawke said, already on the move, a rogue’s sensibilities coupled with a rogue’s speed, ‘but Meredith and Orsino need me to mediate yet _another_ of their lover’s spats, and sometimes I wonder—if I’m not around to stop things—who’s going to tear this city down first. You won’t notice; everything _here’s_ been torn down already. But I don’t appreciate a roof that rains on me every spring. Oh, and Fenris?’ Hawke was already at the door. ‘Do _try_ to remember to feed him.’

Fenris saw Hawke out—not in the literal sense, but rather, saw him fleeing. All his exit needed was a miasmic flask and a hiss of smoke. The front door slammed shut behind him.

The healer was, indeed, standing in the foyer, observing—but not truly seeing—the mushrooms at his feet.

Hawke had done this because he believed—in his misguided way—that Fenris needed the company. An empty house wasn’t an option for him, but for Fenris, it was a given. So many of the people he knew liked to interfere with what they didn’t understand. Busybodies, all of them.

Fenris reminded himself that Anders was lucky. He was here now, in a free city; he hadn’t made the journey on his own. But there was never a time when being passed from hand to hand, from room to room, like a bit of the furniture that just didn’t belong, could be considered _luck_ , and Fenris knew that with a certainty that caused the wine to sit with him unpleasantly.

‘You may do as you please,’ Fenris told Anders—after some consternation. His voice traveled from the balcony down, in the shaft of moonlight from the broken window above.

Anders looked up only to ascertain the location of that voice, and that voice’s owner, then bowed his head once more.

There was nothing in his eyes to indicate that he recognized who Fenris was. As he’d suspected—as Hawke hadn’t predicted—they were as good as strangers to one another.

*

There were mushrooms growing through the floor at Anders’s feet, an entire colony of them, with slender white stalks and dirty brown caps. He wondered whether or not they were poisonous; none were deep mushrooms, from what he remembered during his years at the Circle. He’d been picked out early as a spirit healer, thrust into learning all manner of troublesome botany for the specialization; that education was part of what made him so useful in Hadriana’s household.

In the bearded man’s home—Hawke Estate, named for bearded Hawke—he’d been set to much simpler tasks: cooking and cleaning, ridding the fireplace of its mounds of ash, often brushed aside by the busy dwarf, who knew the preferred way of it. There was also another member of Hadriana’s fallen house living in Hawke’s house; Orana had always been far more eager and more helpful than Anders, at least when it came to those simple things. They’d never talked to one another before; there was no reason to start now, with Orana so busy, looking after the house practically on her own.

It wasn’t a surprise that Anders had been sent away. In all honesty, he felt a bit of relief knowing he wouldn’t have to see himself reflected in the eyes of Hawke’s mabari warhound any longer.

And, he thought as he observed the mushrooms, Fenris’s house seemed in far greater need of tending. Hawke Estate had been comfortable and warm. It wasn’t as large as Danarius’s villa, but there were abstract touches of quiet wealth here and there, suggesting that Hawke—with his broad smile and curiously cheerful demeanor—was a man of considerable means.

By contrast, Fenris lived like an intruder in the wealthy residential district of Hightown. Exactly like a runaway slave.

Anders couldn’t exactly blame him. Perhaps, after a life spent caring only for other people, Fenris no longer had the time or the inclination to care for himself.

 _You may do as you please,_ Fenris had said. And Anders had listened, but the words meant nothing, really; he remained on the first-floor landing where Hawke had left him to his own devices, rooted in place between the mushrooms and a pile of toppled statues near the foot of the stairs. From this vantage point, Anders could see several holes rotting in the ceiling, straight through the rafters to the roof far above. There were cobwebs spun thick and white in every corner, and—from a distance—what looked like a festering _corpse_ in the entryway. Very old, and in an advanced state of decay.

Whatever statement Fenris was making, it seemed to be long past the point of having any meaningful effect. He’d won his freedom; he’d killed his former master _and_ his chief tormentor. There didn’t seem to be much reason to go on living like this.

Unless he liked it. Anders supposed _that_ was always a possibility, too.

The hours went by with the passage of light through the holes in the ceiling. Warm evening sun faded to cool night, and a bright silver sword of moonlight mottled the carpet next to Anders’s feet. He heard footsteps on the upper landing, beginning with a slow and deliberate pace; he looked up in surprise, and remembered himself only moments later. Then, his eyes followed Fenris as he stalked down the stairs, his movements elegant as a cat’s, but just as halting, just as wary.

‘You are…still here,’ Fenris said.

Anders nodded, careful to keep his head up; Fenris was short, which meant that looking down would force Anders to meet his eyes.

‘Anders,’ Fenris added, startling him enough that he _did_ look down.

It was impossible to read from Fenris’s expression what, if anything, he wanted. It might have been because he was an elf, and elves were often that unfathomable; then again, it might just have been his personality. Anders remembered him as a difficult companion: complacent one moment, angry the next. He never settled—even now.

After that, it was trickier to cast his mind back so many years. Everything blurred, indistinct, down to a certain muddied point, around the time he’d accepted there’d be no more escapes.

Still, it seemed Fenris was waiting for something. A proper response, perhaps? Hawke hadn’t minded Anders speaking—he’d even encouraged it, although he didn’t seem to understand why Anders didn’t have much to say.

‘…Yes?’ Anders tried. It couldn’t hurt.

Fenris paused, poised; he had a look about him, like he was waiting for the word Anders knew so well.

‘Master,’ Anders added, because he was expecting it.

Quick anger flared in Fenris’s eyes—the quick anger Anders remembered, the storm that followed the calm. So few times had Fenris allowed, in silence, the tenderness of any healing without protest. And now, this word seemed to make him more furious than even Hadriana’s unrelenting taunts; Anders took a step backward, feeling the mushrooms beneath the heel of his boot, wincing at the soft, foamy resistance they gave when crushed underneath worn leather.

Fenris tensed, again like a cat. Anders recognized the look because he liked cats, and sometimes fed them, watching them prowl about, studying the way they moved from place to place—from windowsill to balcony, from balcony to rooftop, unafraid to leap. It was that lack of awareness that gave them grace. They rarely ever fell, and when they did, they recovered beautifully. Not at all like people, and so much more fond of bowls of milk.

Anders imagined leaving a bowl of milk by the second-floor doorway, just past the landing, for Fenris.

It was funny, and it made no sense.

‘I…’ Fenris began. It took him a while to continue, his anger so much more than equal to his self-control. ‘I would not have you call me that.’

That, Anders thought, was just what Hawke had said. Everyone here was so particular. They had no idea how little names mattered, how titles rarely—if ever—meant anything at all. It was a different sort of precision than what his magisters demanded in Tevinter, the opposite side of the same coin, so much fuss made of absolutely nothing. It was all the same thing to demand a name as it was to demand that _Master_ come before it, but Anders nodded, bowing, rubbing his thumb against the smooth skin on the inside of his wrist.

Beneath was the first tattoo, more like a brand than anything else, red against half-raised flesh, part ink, part scarred tissue: an _F_ , for _fugitivus_ , from his first botched escape attempt. Running away from the Imperium, rather than toward it.

Like all the others, it hadn’t worked out the way he’d planned.

Those errors defined him, he’d come to discover later—since his failures were far more numerous than his successes. Eventually, he forgot the way of it, whatever silly impulse compelled him to keep trying, and tended to the others, punished because they hadn’t learned what he knew yet. Slaves like Fenris, whose anger bloomed hot as blood along an open wound.

‘Then I won’t call you that,’ Anders replied, hoping the words didn’t come off as cheeky. Aside from his earlier refusal to stay put, it was that propensity for humor—that instinct to talk back—that garnered him the most trouble, until at last he’d found a way to pitch and control the timbre of his voice so it tempted no offense. He modeled the tone after the Tranquil in the Circle Tower, recalling, in the night, the silence in their faces.

And it worked, better than any other method. He didn’t _like_ being punished. Few sensible slaves did.

There were some—Anders had tended to them all, he sometimes thought—who enjoyed pain only because it reminded them of who they were. But that was presupposing someone actually wanted to remember, the truth of an identity that had long since ceased to matter.

Fenris struggled with Anders’s prime defense mechanism until he realized he could find no fault with it, despite how little he clearly appreciated it. Anders shifted his foot, hoping the mushrooms weren’t ruined.

‘Shall I plant more of them?’ he asked.

It was often better to draw attention to a mistake by offering a solution, the only cleverness he was still allowed. A preventative measure, to stave off surprise, which usually brought punishment.

Fenris blinked. He followed Anders’s gaze, all the way down to the patterns on the carpet, the bent mushroom stems creeping through the damp weave. Anders knelt beside them, cupping them in his hands. They were surprisingly resilient, hopefully not the sort that caused a rash.

‘Contrary to popular belief,’ Fenris muttered, ‘I am _not_ growing them on purpose.’

‘They’re nice,’ Anders said. It was a carefully chosen phrase, a perfect, nondescript word, the praise in it so faint that no one could possibly think to object. One of the mushrooms had snapped off at the base, and he stroked its rough edges with the same curious reverence he’d reserved for the broken ends of his chain. ‘You could use them in stew, maybe? They don’t _look_ poisonous.’

Fenris had cut his chain, Anders remembered. At the time, it seemed like he wanted to _give_ Anders something, although the exact nature of the gift had become lost, somewhere in the week between.

Now, he looked down, trying to follow Anders’s inexplicable attention to his ruined fungal garden.

‘…Are you hungry?’ Fenris asked. It was long past the hour for dinner, if the stars overhead were any indication, but Anders hadn’t smelled anything cooking. In fact, he couldn’t even be sure this house had a kitchen. Its layout was different from the inside of Hawke’s estate, and different too from the sprawling Imperium villas Anders had grown used to—not living in, but at the very least, inhabiting.

If this was the state Fenris kept his home in, Anders could hardly imagine him preparing food. The thought relaxed him somewhat, like slipping into a cool bath to focus his nerves and calm his sweating body in hot Tevinter summer.

There _would_ be some use for him here, after all.

Even if Fenris didn’t want to be called ‘Master,’ it was still evident he was in dire need of the work a servant could provide. Most people were, whether or not they knew it.

‘I could prepare something,’ Anders offered, the joint of his knee cracking as he stood. In one of the escapes in his youth, he’d had a bad fall; healing had done wonders for the bone, but he couldn’t stop the ball-joint from popping every now and then, especially when it was humid. ‘If you’ll just point me in the direction of the kitchen—’

‘ _No,_ ’ Fenris said, the refusal as sudden as a slap in the face. Anders blinked and fell silent, swallowing to wet his throat where it had run dry.

He’d presumed too much. Obviously.

It was always difficult, learning what pleased another person, with new quirks and unexpected boundaries. But Anders would settle in eventually, the same as always, and things would be easier then.

Fenris watched him so closely that Anders began to feel like an unwelcome field mouse—one that was about to meet a swift end against claws and a mouthful of sharp teeth. There was no blood on Fenris’s armor anymore, and the soft song of lyrium in his skin had dulled to a quiet whisper. But he wasn’t quite unremarkable in the moonlight—more a bladed shadow, shifting from one foot to the other in his Tevinter slave’s armor.

‘Come upstairs,’ Fenris said, finally. ‘It’s warmer there, and I have…’ He paused, thinking something over. ‘I’ll find something for you to eat.’

Anders stared at him. At the lowest point of his stomach, just beneath the nadir of his private despair, a remote hunger began to stir. He was only a mage, and not a remarkably powerful one, at that. He had no lyrium tattoos, no particular build to make him physically stronger than anyone else. In fact, he was well aware of his shortcomings, and needing three square meals a day _was_ rather significant.

With Hadriana, he’d counted himself lucky if he got _one._

The muscles in Fenris’s face tightened for a moment, before a look somewhere close to understanding settled in his eyes. Anders knew that he wasn’t supposed to see it—perhaps Fenris didn’t even realize it was there—but somehow, he couldn’t look away.

‘Come,’ Fenris said, beckoning where he might have commanded. He flicked his sharp-tipped fingers. ‘Things are more comfortable upstairs, Anders.’

There was his name again, tacked awkwardly at the end of Fenris’s sentence like a patch sewn clumsily onto a foreign garment. It was clear that he was unused to speaking to anyone this way—not even Hawke had gone to such trouble to remember Anders’s name, a fact which had honestly made Anders more comfortable than anything. How could it possibly set him at ease to be at the heart of such obvious anxiety?

Fenris was doing it for reasons of his own, however. And, Anders told himself, he didn’t have to understand them.

*

A few awkward days passed. Fenris was unaccustomed to sharing the space he thought of as his—even though it never had been, save for the fact that he was the only one there to occupy it—and there were times, in the night, when the creak of a distant floorboard or the shifting of a bedsheet saw him bolting upright, reaching for his blade, before he remembered.

He was not alone.

At least, not in the literal sense.

Hawke was clearly expecting gratitude, but like all of Hawke’s gifts, its necessity was something more of a slow burn than a thunderclap. By the time Fenris understood it, it would be too late to thank him—the time passed, the opportunity missed, the relevance somewhere too far behind them. And perhaps Hawke expected _that_ , as well.

It was harder than ever, these days, to understand him.

‘I know what I’d do with my very own mage,’ Isabela said, pretending to shiver. No one asked her to elaborate, and for a moment, she seemed put out, until she no longer allowed their lack of enthusiasm to bother her. She had her pauses, like the rest of them, but she was far quicker to recover than anyone Fenris had ever met. ‘Well, since no one had the decency—or should I say the fortitude?—to ask me what that is, I suppose I’ll keep it to myself. Your loss, really.’

‘Come on, Rivaini,’ Varric told her. ‘Like we don’t already know. Like we haven’t already heard what you’ve _done_ with mages a hundred times before. It’s enough to make _my_ ears blush.’

‘It’s the _details_ , Varric,’ Isabela replied. ‘And here I’d’ve thought _you’d_ be man enough to understand a little thing like that.’

‘My dear companions,’ Hawke said, from up ahead, ‘perhaps we might stop bickering fondly for just a moment, and focus our attention on the _murderous revenants racing toward me_ at this very point in time? What say you to _that_ plan of attack—which, coincidentally, doesn’t involve my gruesome murder?’

They all wanted so badly to ask Fenris outright how he was getting on—to see if he’d let the mage starve yet, or frightened him off, or worse. And yet despite their overwhelming curiosity, they still toed around it like a stretch of the Wounded Coast riddled with marauders’ traps, so careful not to trigger anything. In the heat of the moment, they _would_ trip the wire eventually. It was the same as it always was, some new and thrilling rumor proving more interesting than the task at hand; perhaps Fenris could simply count himself lucky they were all distracted by this latest, and no one even mentioned the concept of sisters found and sisters lost.

He threw himself into the fray with the same avoidance of distraction as he’d learned, so many years ago, to cultivate. It was a hard battle, and a noble one, the sting of ancient magic fresh upon the cool Sundermount air long after they’d felled the day’s enemies.

‘Why is it that something like this _always_ happens when I’m about to catch up on the latest gossip?’ Isabela asked, looting their armor for anything that caught her eye. She was the sort, like Hawke, who always found something shiny.

‘Seems to me you’re just lucky like that,’ Varric replied.

Fenris avoided their questions on the long way back to the city; as always, they were incapable of accepting that his refusal to talk really _did_ mean he had no secrets to divulge at the present time.

‘When there is something to say, I’ll say it,’ Fenris said finally, never quite to the point of exasperation, but always pushed closer and closer to that precipice by these masters of idle conversation.

‘Somehow, I can’t bring myself to trust you when you say that,’ Isabela replied.

Fenris left them to a night at the Hanged Man, drinking their favored bilge. ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘You wouldn’t, I’d imagine.’

He had no reason to avoid the house he’d come to think of not as home, but at least as a consistent place to stay. Whether or not Anders chose to wait for him by the door was entirely up to his discretion—only Fenris knew, easing in over the broken stone in the entranceway, there was nothing true about that statement, and he could lie to others all he wished without visiting the same injustice upon himself.

Anders _was_ waiting by the doorway, as expected. He was holding a bottle of wine.

‘Thirsty?’ he asked.

Fenris was, but there was something about that eagerness that forced him toward disagreement. ‘No,’ he replied.

Anders’s face fell, golden brows furrowing as he turned the bottle in his hand to examine the label. ‘Is there something wrong with it? Or…is it not the kind you like? I can fetch another one. I _thought_ this was what you were drinking last night…’

‘Enough,’ Fenris said, stalking past him into the house. He was out of sorts now, cranky because he’d refused the wine he secretly desired, and because Anders seemed so stubbornly set—still!— _against_ living for himself.

The elf—Orana—had been the same way. Hadriana’s slaves always were so eager to please.

Fenris took the stairs two-by-two; the master bedroom was no safe heaven, but he was eager enough to reach it all the same. The first thing he noticed within was that someone had removed the heaping ashes from the fireplace; that _same_ someone had also gone to the trouble of opening the windows to encourage a cross-breeze. The torn fabric of a slashed velvet curtain had been pinned over the largest hole in the ceiling, the one that had extended over the years to expose Fenris’s bed to the elements.

Fenris heard Anders’s steady bootfalls on the creaking floorboards behind him. He didn’t call attention to the work he’d done, not asking for praise because he did not want to court the potential for disapproval. Instead, he lingered behind Fenris hopefully, like the second shadow he’d never asked for.

‘This was…not necessary,’ Fenris said, briefly unsure whether it was the right thing to call attention to it all, or to ignore the changes as efficiently as he’d turned down the wine. ‘Unless it was done for your own comfort.’

‘It gets stuffy in here,’ Anders said, setting the full bottle of wine down on Fenris’s table. He sidestepped Fenris himself, sitting stiffly on the bench he’d claimed as a bed the previous night. As though there weren’t other rooms, other beds, other empty hearths to curl up in.

They were going to have to do something about that, Fenris realized. It couldn’t be comfortable, even if it was marginally preferable to rolling into the fireplace itself.

Fenris had no desire to issue further commands, but Anders seemed to have few impulses of his own, and even fewer desires.

He supposed, if it came to matters of the mage’s wellbeing, he _could_ use his own experiences to try and help. After all, he knew better than anyone else how difficult it was to adjust from a life of slavery to that of a free man. It was a concept Fenris himself still didn’t _truly_ understand, but he’d lived in Kirkwall for over seven years now. By all rights, he had to know more than Anders did.

But it was the burden of that knowledge that halted his progress. How very badly he wanted a thing seemed directly proportional to how difficult it became to achieve it.

‘It does get stuffy,’ Fenris agreed at length. He settled himself in a chair at the table, tugging over one of the heavy, open tomes. Something Varric had written; it looked more difficult than it was. And, Hawke explained, the print was large, so Hightown ladies wouldn’t have to squint and court disaster in the form of wrinkles. ‘This is much better.’

Anders shifted in place, folding his hands in his lap. Out of the corner of his eye, Fenris saw unsteady ease settle upon his shoulders, in his face.

Good. That much seemed like progress. Or so one might have thought.

The same couldn’t be said for the words on the page in front of him. His reading lessons with Hawke had slowed to a halt over recent weeks—Hawke was always busy; _how_ busy depended on the time of year—and although he’d never admit it, Fenris found the whole business far more difficult without a second party to confirm his choices. Without someone who _knew_ the words, all Fenris had was his own uneducated guesswork. He could _not_ be certain, and without that certainty the entire exercise felt futile—a directionless endeavor, perhaps even undoing decent progress, more than anything else.

Time passed slowly, and the letters seemed to shift and rearrange against the curved steel of Fenris’s finger-guard. Hawke had suggested reading a page line-by-line instead of taking in all at once, the same way a man chose to divide and conquer on the battlefield, and the strategy helped slightly, at times. But there was nothing Fenris could do about the awkward gaps in his memory—recognizing a word he’d learned months ago only to draw a sudden _blank_ where the meaning ought to be.

Still, Fenris supposed, these reading lessons meant more than he was yet capable of admitting. Not to himself—that was never the difficulty—but to others. The lessons had a purpose, which they served admirably. Even without the assurance, Hawke’s steady voice murmuring wordless assent, a little nod or shake of his head at Fenris’s latest guess, it passed the time, and filled the silence, and offered insight.

And that, Fenris assumed, was why so many enjoyed it.

It was another of Hawke’s gifts, one that took time to appreciate real value. But, when all was said and done, there it was, a beacon of light amidst the rest.

‘Anders,’ Fenris began.

Anders stiffened, a reaction Fenris knew so well. His hands, stained with soot from the fireplace, tensed in his lap. His shoulders lifted, but his eyes didn’t. ‘Yes,’ he replied, only half a question. The rest was acknowledgement, apology, even; he’d braced himself for another reprimand.

It was _not_ how this was meant to be. Even Hawke, without the same experiences—or perhaps because he lacked them—would be better suited for the task. Kinder, somehow; more understanding. He always was. And meanwhile, Fenris, for whom it held so many, other meanings, struggled with it.

If Hawke did not do quite so much good, it would have been possible for so many more people to resent him than already did.

Fenris quelled the thought. No good came of being jealous of other men for reasons beyond one’s capability, or even one’s desire. That it was there was no reason to envy it.

‘What do you know of reading?’ Fenris asked.

Anders paused. Fenris saw him consider the words, searching for the trick beneath them—as though Fenris was not always, painfully straightforward. ‘Reading,’ he repeated. Again, it didn’t dare become a question.

Fenris _tched_ in the back of his throat, before he realized its scorn might seem to have an unexpected focus. It was not blame, but so many things found any way they could to be misinterpreted. ‘That was not—’ he began. He abandoned it. ‘—forget that,’ he said instead, the tips of his gauntlets pressing into the worn leather binding. ‘I mean, _reading_. Can you do it, or can you not?’

Again, Anders hesitated, though he did move closer along the bench. It creaked beneath his weight, and he cringed at the suddenness of the sound. ‘…I can, actually.’ He waited. Fenris said nothing. It was good, he thought; these silences should have given him the freedom to speak further.

But Anders seemed inclined to say nothing more on the subject. Fenris felt thwarted, though he tried not to betray his frustration.

‘That is good,’ Fenris said. He swallowed his other inclinations. They sat in the center of his chest, high but heavy, and weighing upon all his other, lesser emotions. ‘I…could not, until recently. I would say that I _still_ cannot, though there are some,’ Hawke’s face came to mind, ‘who would choose to disagree with me there.’

‘I see,’ Anders said.

He didn’t.

Fenris recalled the first time he reached Sundermount’s highest peak, Varric panting, Hawke sweating, Merrill laughing nervously. It had been a difficult climb. He was used to such endeavors, scaling wearisome territory, trails without end, tasks without succor. He told himself this was hardly similar, then acknowledged the lie for what it was—an attempt at self-comfort. To make things seem _easier_.

Easier was not always better. He knew this.

‘Shall I read to you?’ Anders suggested.

 _This_ was not easy.

‘No,’ Fenris replied, but he managed to make it sound less harsh than the first _no_ of the evening. ‘That will not help me,’ he explained, to soften it even further. The sound of his own voice troubled him—far too coddling—and he cleared his throat. He wanted his wine. ‘There is a passage. It is long. A loquacious dwarf wrote it, and he prefers a paragraph where a mere sentence might suffice.’

When he cultivated the next silence, Fenris thought he saw Anders look for the title—but when he tilted the book in his hands, to aid the process, Anders looked away.

‘ _Hard in Hightown_ ,’ Fenris said dryly. ‘It is…something.’

‘I see,’ Anders said again.

Once again: he likely didn’t.

‘Does it…interest you?’ Fenris asked. He was coming to the end of his limits, exasperated as when the same word continued, despite all efforts, to elude him. It was moments like those, Hawke liked to say, that he regretted lending Fenris _any_ of his favorite books, for fear they’d become kindling for the fire.

Anders didn’t reply. Fenris watched as he swiped a pink tongue over his chapped lips, chewing on the very corner once the pass was complete. While Fenris had never been talkative _himself,_ he had cultivated over the years a tremendous wealth of experience for what it was like being around _other_ more garrulous people—and he also knew the signs of one who was trying to be silent against all his better instincts.

Fenris had discovered there were a great many lessons to be learned outside Minrathous; there had also been a great many lessons to _un_ learn, as well. Before the reading had begun, he couldn’t have said which was more difficult.

Fenris levered his leg up beneath the table, circumspectly pushing out a chair. It wasn’t a command, or even a request—no; it was the simplest suggestion he could conceive of. It was a wonder really, how the _simple_ things seemed to require an inverse amount of work.

The feet of the chair scraped along the bare floor. Alone in his sitting room with a ex-slave mage, Fenris was sweating nearly as much as he had two summers ago, when they’d routed an entire raiding party of bandits from the Wounded Coast. The infamous _Evet’s Marauders,_ another of Hawke’s legendary triumphs.

After a long pause—far too long, but at least time would tell _something_ —Anders rose to his feet. Fenris watched him over-top of the page, judging the careful gait, the lack of direction Anders displayed in traveling from place to place . He was doing his utmost not to draw attention to himself—which was foolish, since he already _had_ Fenris’s attention, and clearly nothing terrible had happened because of it.

Fenris knew it wasn’t as easy as cause and proof and all the other demarcations of comfort, for a free man. He himself had never been afforded the particular luxury of _avoiding_ attention, since no matter where he went, he was marked with the same cursed tattoos. Everyone in Danarius’s wide circle of influence—everyone in _Minrathous,_ it sometimes seemed—knew him as a pet. A dangerous one, a half-tamed wolf, but a _pet_ nonetheless. It had also amused them to think about the weak body of an elf being imbued with such power.

They hadn’t feared him then, but Fenris liked to think they did now.

The echoed scrape of one of his chairs against the floor brought Fenris back to himself. Anders had settled in next to him, eyes darting from the page to Fenris’s shoulder—not quite ready to ask a question, nor quite willing to draw Fenris’s focus in any more noticeable way.

‘You should look me in the eye,’ Fenris said, letting the book fall open on the table between them. ‘We are equals, here. It will be better, the sooner you learn it.’

Anders swallowed. Fenris could hear the wet sound it made, sitting close enough that Anders’s silences still bore something to be discovered. He leaned forward, one pale hand resting tentatively against the open pages. His fingers traced the words, and Fenris thought he might have found some meaning in them that continually eluded others, no matter how many times they’d tried to read it.

He forced his frustration and envy back down. The sudden feelings were unexpected, to say nothing of uncharitable. Anders hadn’t been born in the Imperium; he had every reason to look at words as though he’d encountered an old friend in the street, favoring them with a gentle greeting. If he was eager to become reacquainted with them, then it was not Fenris’s place to stand in his way.

Even if his own view on reading was that the words were a small army ranged in front of him, and there was no ally left to help defeat them.

Honestly, it was a wonder—like Hawke said—that so many of Hawke’s books survived in any capacity.

‘Were you…here?’ Anders asked. The sudden question drew Fenris out of his thoughts once more. That was a neat little ploy, if Anders was doing it on purpose. Fenris found himself curiously mindful of it. ‘‘Gavin Falcon was a man of few words and many actions?’’

‘ _Actions,_ ’ Fenris repeated, pleased to have the word in his hand at last, like a niggling splinter that had finally worked its way free. ‘I did not…’ He’d thought it was _ac-tee-ons,_ as though words ever attempted to sound the way they were spelled; he did not care for this business of letters meaning one thing, then choosing to mean another when placed in combination.

*

The mansion wasn’t cold, but the corpse, at times, disturbed him. Fenris was difficult, but all his violence was committed elsewhere—if the blood stains on his armor were indicative of anything. And how could they not be?

He returned home with little wounds from time to time; occasionally, there was barely even a scratch, just a tear in the flanking of his armor or a stain beneath a vambrace to betray where he’d been. Off, adventuring, with Hawke, in the wilds of the Free Marches. But he never spoke about it, save to announce his departures—sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the evening, and never a predictable routine.

Because of that, Anders did his best not to think about it, day after day, or during the quiet nights, listening to the fire die in the hearth. Cool breezes shuffled in through the open window, and as long as burglars or enemies didn’t do the same, it was pleasant enough. As for the rest, it wasn’t cold—then again, it was still summer, and winter always brought those unexpected hardships, even to Tevinter.

Kirkwall might prove to be the same.

There was no point in predicting that, just as there was no point in predicting Fenris’s behavior. Anders could try to _anticipate_ , but even then, all his best attempts seemed to hinder more than they helped.

When Anders recalled, very dimly, Fenris’s prior reactions to assistance, he supposed he could understand why. He’d never accepted aid, though sometimes he’d seen fit to tolerate it, crouched like a wounded animal across the confines of some solitary cell.

Anders had no opinions on the state of the mansion, or why a freed slave would choose to live in a place half-crumbling to the ground, more than half the rooms untouched behind closed doors. From time to time, Fenris had visitors: the woman Anders remembered from Hawke’s mansion, who wore so much gold, and winked at him whenever she passed by, as though she didn’t know or didn’t care _what_ he was, or even who; or the armored fellow, orange scarf around his neck, bearing a pack of cards, far less certain what to make of Anders in the doorway, waiting, should Fenris someday recognize he needed anything.

But they were few and far between. Anders hadn’t been there long enough to comprehend the reasons, the occasions. These things happened, and time passed.

And then, there was reading.

 _Hard in Hightown_ , pages fifty-seven through sixty-five, had been achieved, over the course of three late evenings. Gavin Falcon was a man of few words and many actions; the story was a tale of many actions and even more words; and Fenris was diligent, determined, easily flustered, a combination of things that Anders suspected had something to do with his presence.

He might have gone to tend to the mushrooms in the foyer, if Fenris hadn’t asked him to stay.

There was bringing someone a bottle of wine, just the right temperature from the cellar, unstoppering it silently, and knowing to pour the appropriate amount. But there were also other ways to serve, or at least to make one’s services available. This seemed to be the only outlet Anders would find in this place, so long as Fenris maintained his curious position, and Anders was marginally grateful for the option.

It gave him something to do, in any case. Some menial, momentary purpose, for the duration of a few pages.

Anders waited, watching the page. The words formed in the silence, while Fenris studied each letter, how they were arranged, their place in the midst of their sentences. Anders suspected he might have taken in too much at once—he began with the whole, rather than the sum of its parts, despite his better instincts—and the long wait, full of _too much_ study, made all the words begin to lose their instinctive sense, until finally they might as well have been a jumble of scratches on the page, while Anders stared, unblinking, after them.

‘The trouble,’ Fenris began, hard and sudden into the silence, ‘is that so many of the words are _not_ what they seem. Why can they not hold the same properties from one page to the next?’

Anders licked his lips, and blinked at last. The letters scrambled back into place; they made sense again, now that his eyes weren’t swimming.

Fenris made a noise, a voiced dissatisfaction Anders had no idea how to begin to fix. ‘No matter what I do,’ Fenris muttered, in conclusion, ‘it always makes the most sense as _pah-tee-ent._ ’

For a moment, Anders didn’t understand. Then, the word in question before him appeared upon the page. _Gavin Falcon could no longer afford to be patient._ Anders was leery of correcting anyone who wore so much armor, but he rocked forward slightly on the chair. He couldn’t be faulted for reading the sentence as it was—the sentence as Fenris already knew it. ‘Gavin Falcon could no longer afford to be patient,’ he said.

‘And somehow you avoid laughing at this farce.’ Fenris closed the book—he was always closing the book—a great clap of a motion that set them both on edge. Then, he paused, with his thumb still between the pages, opening it again. It was the only place he showed such a clear propensity for revision, or really, the only time he second-guessed himself at all. The rest of his actions, Anders found, were always admirably certain. ‘It _is_ worthy of laughter,’ Fenris continued. ‘That you have managed to hold back this long is likely admirable. Even Hawke cannot keep his shoulders from shaking, and that always betrays the laugh, you see. Are you always this restrained?’

‘…An acquired talent,’ Anders replied. The question seemed to insist upon a solid answer.

Fenris snorted. ‘Yes.’ He ran his finger along the page, finding the line in question. ‘Well. You shall have to be _pah-tee-ent_ with me.’

The feeling bubbled up before Anders could stop it, before he could do anything more than recognize it was about to happen; then, a _laugh_ slipped free of his throat, ragged and disbelieving, barely more than a hiccup. He balled his hands into fists, feeling the bite of his uneven nails as they dug into his soft palms. It had been so long since he’d felt amusement for anything—so long since he’d _had_ to combat that irresistible urge—that there’d been no way to catch himself in time.

And now he’d gone and laughed at Fenris—just as predicted—though he was possibly the _last_ person who deserved such a reaction.

Anders dropped his hands and his eyes to his lap. Fenris wasn’t violent here—Anders knew that—but he _did_ have a keen sense of personal embarrassment. He was capable of violence. In that way, he was exactly like the cat Anders had first compared him to: incredibly concerned with his own dignity, and merciless to those who damaged it.

‘Hn,’ Fenris said, like there was something caught in the back of his throat. At the very edges of his vision, Anders thought he saw his mouth quirk. It seemed impossible—a trick of the light, or Anders’s eyes, less keen than they used to be from years of straining to see in the dark. Fenris had never smiled before. Anders couldn’t tell what this brief expression was. ‘And Varric said I couldn’t make anyone laugh.’

‘That seems…shortsighted of him,’ Anders said. The obvious joke rested on his tongue before he could think better of it, demanding to be free. ‘Then again, he _is_ a dwarf.’

Fenris coughed dryly.

Anders had little experience inspiring pleasure in others, unless their laughter found its source in derision. Hadriana’s had been high and mocking; Danarius’s soft and desiccated, an old snake shedding its skin. But Fenris laughed like he’d never done it before—like it was something he’d read about in a book, and was now trying, from the description, to imitate.

‘Indeed,’ Fenris said. ‘Although sometimes I wonder if he forgets himself. His height, at the very least.’

Anders realized, however unexpectedly, that they were having a conversation. Or at least, he thought they were. It had been many years since he’d had the experience for himself; he couldn’t be sure the criteria for one remained the same today as it had been more than ten years ago.

‘The Dwarf Who Forgot He Was a Dwarf,’ Anders said, voice hesitant but still, somehow, _there_. It was dangerous to allow himself to go on speaking this way. His eyes were beginning to water with the deep focus he’d devoted to the open book in front of him, perched on Fenris’s knee—as though he might be permitted to crawl inside of it and forget, if only for the course of a page, that he’d chosen to sustain this conversation. Choice itself, after all, was never within reach of contemplation. ‘That certainly sounds like…something. A story, perhaps.’

‘Don’t give him any ideas,’ Fenris warned. There was a warmth even in his rebukes, so slight that Anders couldn’t be sure whether Fenris was aware of it.

‘Yes,’ Anders agreed, under his breath. Because it had been advice and not a command, he suspected Fenris might not mind being agreed with so easily.

The silence lapsed between them once more as Fenris turned his attention back to reading. After the _pa-tee-ent_ lesson, he seemed to have less difficulty with the _ti_ words. If Anders had been a better teacher, he might have suggested that Fenris think of them as traps to avoid—that only remembering the _true_ pronunciation could disarm the hidden mechanism. But Anders hadn’t spent enough time at the Circle to graduate from apprentice to mentor.

He could only picture his _own_ mentor’s face in his mind as an indistinct blur of features. These days, he seemed to resemble Hawke, though that was only because of the beard.

Some time passed. Moonlight traveled across the floor while Fenris read, slow but not always easy, out loud in the small space between them. Anders hid his yawns, and Fenris wasn’t the type to grow weary, or show that weariness. Still, eventually, they lost their focus, and Anders slept a scant few hours against the bench by the guttered fire, as always, remaining grateful that it never changed position.

In the morning, there was the usual difficulty. When Anders woke at the first sign of sunlight, the sound of the bench creaking beneath him woke Fenris in turn, and he clearly hated it—not the act of being roused, but what it represented for him. That he was no longer alone. Not for the first time, Anders cringed beneath the suddenness of Fenris’s reactions, the way he moved for his weapon before anything else.

It wasn’t easy to relax completely after that, or in the knowledge that the whole incident—predictable as it was—drove Fenris from his own home, stalking out the door without instructions for the day.

Anders supposed it might be possible to read while he was away, but when it came to lifting the cover of one of Fenris’s books—which were scattered every which-way, on top of a broken vanity, by an empty bottle on the wine-table, and in all four corners of the room, on the very floors, broken bindings caked with thick dust—he decided it might be inadvisable. He wouldn’t ask. Fenris might offer the possibility, in the future, if he thought of it, but for now there were the sounds of some distant argument to follow—Fenris’s loudest neighbors, just across the courtyard, starting their day only now that the sun was somewhat higher in the sky.

They had their reasons—an arranged marriage between noble houses—and their main point of contention was their son, a mage, no longer with them. The woman of the house missed him, in an abstract way, while her husband tried to convince them both they weren’t disappointed with how little their plans for his future mattered now that he’d never accomplish them. Sometimes, they yelled at their servants. Sometimes, there were crashing sounds; the woman had the vapors, and often she fainted, just after throwing things.

In many ways, it was better than a story. It required less concentration, although following it did depend on keen hearing along with a fine sense for listening. Anders had both, having trained himself to pick up on every conversation—the better to read a room, to know what pitfalls the evening might bring. If, for example, there might be some attempt on Hadriana’s life, as there were so many.

Never a dull moment in Tevinter.

Anders bowed his head. The fighting had stopped. He wondered what came next—sadness or acceptance, whether people like that would ever _truly_ know what acceptance was.

Downstairs, the door fell shut, a large echo in so much empty space. Anders stood quickly and moved to the landing. There was nothing to do—nothing Fenris approved of either way—but it still seemed imprudent to waste a day in idleness. That never reflected well, all things considered.

‘Welcome home,’ Anders said, a customary greeting.

‘Come,’ Fenris told him. It was somewhere between an order and a request, no longer a suggestion, rather more like an idea. He seemed to think it might have been too much of a demand—as though that really mattered—when Anders hurried down the stairs, mindful of the third one up from the bottom, which was very broken. ‘No, _no_ ,’ he muttered, brow darkening with fresh shadows. ‘ _Will_ you come with me?’

‘Here I am,’ Anders offered, not loud enough to remind him of all the things he hated about these conversations. Or so he hoped, anyway.

Fenris waited.

It seemed he wanted more; but, with the right words on the tip of his tongue, he wasn’t able to articulate it. Anders reminded himself of how important it was to help without making his assistance obvious—not the mark of a good healer, but the mark of an acceptable slave.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

At that, Fenris was mollified. His shoulders eased, in any case, though the rest of him—a ranging impatience, the shift of his weight from one side to the other and back again—remained unchanged. ‘You are a healer,’ Fenris said.

A statement. And yet it wanted clarification, or at least agreement, which Anders could so easily provide.

‘…Yes,’ he said.

‘I know another healer,’ Fenris continued. ‘The two of you might find…something to talk about. He is…easy to talk to.’

‘I see,’ Anders said, although those two words together tended to bother Fenris more than anything, even the creak of the bench in the morning. Now was no exception. Anders would train himself out of that bad habit, eventually, if he was given the chance. For some reason, it was taking longer than usual to remember—perhaps the immediacy, the necessity, faded dangerously in a free city, the knowledge of that freedom disturbing his ability to learn.

‘You can spend your days at the clinic,’ Fenris concluded firmly. He’d made up his mind, and Anders found no fault in it, though he knew he couldn’t appear too eager to agree with everything. ‘It _is_ in Darktown, but it’s also…better, I am led to understand, than being holed up _here_ , without real company all day.’

The pile of bones by the door, Anders supposed, didn’t count in that estimation.

*

It had been Karl’s idea in the first place. Fenris had capitulated, had asked him for advice only because the impenetrability of the matter seemed to grow more extreme each day, rather than gradually being diminished. It was in the best interests of not making matters even worse, compounding them into something incurable. Some outside perspective was needed.

Karl was a healer. He was a good man, a good mage—like Bethany—worthy of some credit, though at times the phrase still stuck in Fenris’s throat.

He was also impossible to argue with, yet somehow always available to listen. It was a dirty trick of his personality, not related to _magic_ at all, and many people—Fenris included—seemed to be grateful for the nature of that disposition. It was a cousin of Hawke’s flair for being both infuriating and invaluable in one.

Perhaps it had something to do with their beards, but Fenris had never asked, and neither Hawke nor Karl had ever volunteered that information.

Anders had reacted with confusion to the suggestion, but perhaps that was only to be expected. When Fenris cast his mind back to his own demeanor—the massacre he’d perpetrated on Seheron simply because Danarius had demanded it—he found it harder to find fault in Anders’s personality. At least he was a healer, not a murderer; whatever his flaws, the faces that haunted him in the night would not belong to ghosts of those he’d killed, but rather those he’d tried—and failed—to save.

Fenris picked nimbly ahead through the human debris and various waste products of Darktown’s streets and architecture. That seemed to be a theme around Kirkwall these days; the entire settlement was rotten at its core, and although Hightown did its best to conceal the truth, no amount of perfumery and fine silks could hide the scent of decay. It was a dying city—one that would eventually collapse in on itself.

Perhaps then Fenris would leave. But only when he had no choice.

Karl had mentioned that most of the refugees had seen fit to clear out in the years since Hawke had dueled and defeated the Arishok, but Fenris himself saw no real difference. The poor were poor—it didn’t matter whether one was a Kirkwaller and the other a Fereldan. Perhaps it was a distinction lost on him, due to how little time he spent in Darktown. No one in his right mind—not even a slave with the barest idea of freedom—wanted, of his own free will, to trawl through these wretched sewers all day.

No one save for Karl, perhaps.

A wet squelch from behind alerted Fenris to Anders’s presence. He’d been distracted by something—the mud-streaked carcass of a dead dog, perhaps, or the drunken man slumbering atop it, as though it was a pillow—and stepped directly into a large puddle. Now, he simply stared at his left boot, soaked up to the ankle in mud. Fenris _tsked_ , then reached back, grabbing Anders beneath the elbow and hauling him free of the muck.

His arm was thin beneath the threadbare fabric of his robe, and he went boneless as soon as Fenris took hold of him, in a misguided attempt at being agreeable.

Fenris ignored what he recognized in the impulse, even though it sent a shiver of distaste down his spine. He had _tried_ patience, had done his very best to point out every time Anders did something _not_ for himself, but for the benefit of an imagined master. None of it had brought about the change Fenris desired. If anything, Anders seemed to take Fenris’s reaction as further displeasure, instead of the kindness it so _obviously_ was.

If this had been Hawke’s idea of a joke, then it was failing spectacularly. Fenris planned on having a word with him—several, pointed words, as sharp as the daggers Hawke favored—once he’d secured Anders with a purpose beyond sitting alone in the mansion and contemplating the gathering dust.

Fenris had done that for himself once, in the long-lost weeks before Hawke’s expedition to the Deep Roads. He knew already how depressing it could be.

‘Nearly there,’ Fenris muttered, releasing Anders as soon as they were clear of their current obstacles.

Predictably, Anders said nothing.

The lamp above Karl’s clinic was unlit, a fact for which Fenris found himself grateful. He couldn’t fathom being troubled with other patients on top of his particular burden today. But then, Fenris’s sense of charity—already meager at the best of times—was beginning to wear as thin as Anders’s robes.

He knocked, rather than deigning to let himself in. Fenris had learned the hard way what sort of surprises he could expect when bursting into a house of healing—and therefore illness—unannounced. Karl had helped him to clean up afterward, but the memory…lingered.

As did most things one encountered in Darktown, to be sure.

Karl had known to expect them, and yet he took his time in answering—his own way, Fenris often suspected, of maintaining his boundaries, whatever they were. Even after years of knowing the man, of being healed by him in battle, of accepting and learning to respect his self-restraint—perhaps after coming to _trust_ him—Fenris still didn’t know him, not completely. Then again, he didn’t know anyone, not in the same way a man like Hawke seemed to know people—almost better than they knew themselves.

For someone like Fenris, it was preferable this way. The knowledge, he could only assume, would rankle like a burr, a burden from dusk until dawn, and a hindrance in combat. Not to mention the ill effect it would take on even the most paltry conversations.

Perhaps this, in part, was why Hawke could be so difficult.

At last, Fenris heard the sound of distant footfalls, the muffled voice from within. ‘I know you aren’t templars; templars never knock,’ Karl said, sounding different from afar, before he opened the door, wiping his hands with some swath of dirty dropcloth. ‘Fenris,’ he continued, more himself now. His eyes sparkled. ‘What a pleasant surprise.’

Despite how long Fenris had known these people, the pleasure they took in petty deceptions—the joke of the thing—still failed to captivate him in quite the same way as it did them. He’d never understand why it proved so attractive to say one thing when you meant another, especially when it was so obvious to everyone. Gratification taken from a casual lie, perhaps. That nothing was riding on it, and there was no pressing need to convince anyone.

Presumably, there was no harm in that.

‘Yes,’ Fenris said—for what other reply was there for a lie they both knew? Karl himself had suggested the visit, with Fenris at his wit’s end; a coward’s way out, perhaps, but even Hawke hadn’t taught him freedom by himself. They all had, treating him as equal with such determination that, in time, he could do nothing other than believe it. As with most things revolving around Hawke, the results were a group effort. Unless one counted the duel with the Arishok—Hawke still blamed him for arranging that, as much as he blamed Isabela for causing the disturbance in the first place.

Fenris turned back to Anders—he’d been so quiet it was possible his boot had stuck again in a distant puddle, and now he was besieged by some combination of refugees and Kirkwall’s other, assorted most impoverished. But Anders was there, hands balled into fists. Always it surprised Fenris to be reminded how much taller he was, intent as he was on becoming small.

Karl cleared his throat, gently. It seemed to imply that Fenris ought to say something further, a gentle suggestion, far more kindly put than any Fenris had offered Anders in recent memory. That, more than anything, rankled—if only because Fenris knew he hardly deserved it.

‘This is the clinic,’ Fenris decided on finally, acquitting himself of the situation in the only way he knew how. ‘It is a free one. This mage—’ Karl cleared his throat again, ‘ _Karl Thekla_ runs it.’

There, he concluded. No more was necessary. Varric would have spent hours describing its history; Hawke would have become distracted, talking at length about unrelated incidents and acts of careless heroics; and Isabela would have reminded them all of the time she’d met Seneschal Bran on his way out, trying to remain discreet, only to find himself in Isabela’s arms, in the latest delivery of Karl’s fresh supplies, sacks of elfroot and the like. Fenris, on the other hand, gave only the information that was prudent.

Anders was already overwhelmed enough.

Indeed, his face was white; Fenris wondered if Darktown’s stench had anything to do with it. Only the docks in Minrathous had been quite so sour, but it was another flavor entirely, barrels full of oil and fish rotting in the sun, the essentials for the delicacy _garum_ , which the magisters favored so much. The memory of the smell made Fenris’s stomach turn, as did the memory of being forced to eat it; Darktown’s aromas paled in comparison, more mud and sickness than pure, fishy _putrefaction_.

Karl gave Fenris a knowing look. He must have understood the awkwardness now, finally seeing it for himself. Nothing like this was ever easy, but the suspicion Fenris had of _no_ progress being made whatsoever did provide a stumbling block.

He wondered if he could leave now. Seeing Anders’s face, hidden in shadow, the skin pale beneath his stubbled cheek, he knew he could do no such thing.

Even here, he wouldn’t introduce himself.

Fenris couldn’t expect every freed slave to come to the same conclusions he had, nor as quickly; his circumstances had never been ideal, but they provided certain benefits that others did _not_ have. For him, the change had come about rather suddenly, a combination of slavery in stark relief with its alternative. Not everyone could suffer—or enjoy—the same immediate epiphany.

Karl stepped out of the way; he was wise enough to avoid staring, and clever enough that he knew the effects such scrutiny would have on a man. He treated everyone as equal, a talent they most sorely needed. Sometimes, Fenris counted himself among that number, depending on the day he’d had.

But Anders remained, stubbornly, in the doorway, even after Fenris gave up on waiting for him to enter first. He paused beyond the threshold, and looked back, knowing full well he had a face that revealed all subtle things, included this new filigree of annoyance.

‘…You don’t like it,’ Fenris said—or rather, assumed. It seemed a safe enough bet.

‘Nothing personal, I’m sure,’ Karl added. ‘Most people don’t, come to think of it.’

‘This was a bad idea.’ Fenris’s fingers twitched before his face, not a nervous habit, but one he occasionally indulged in when he was particularly discouraged. ‘We should not have come here.’

Anders shook his head just once, a rapid motion that might just as easily have been him shaking a fly off his cheek. If Fenris had been kinder—gifted with Varric’s intuition, or Isabela’s instinct for thoughtlessly drawing people out—he might have sidled closer and attempted to uncover the root of this latest problem. But Fenris had neither of those skills, and lacked a great many others; instead, he stood to one side, posture ready to shatter at any sudden movement. At least Anders, of his own volition, had finally _looked up_.

‘It’s fine,’ he said, at length. He sucked in a labored breath, reminding Fenris of a punctured bellows. There was a blacksmith in Lowtown who did all his work in the open air; Fenris had gone there with Aveline to observe the origins of sword-making once, reasoning that if he didn’t know where _he’d_ come from, the least he could do was learn about his blade. ‘…Hello, Karl.’

Karl, who’d been conveniently occupying himself with a crate full of poultices, turned with just a fraction of his timing thrown. But that fraction was enough. He nearly dropped the crate before starting forward with an urgency Fenris didn’t—or couldn’t—understand. With him came the strong scent of elfroot, and Fenris had to wrinkle his nose to keep from sneezing.

‘ _Anders?_ ’ Karl sounded as though he didn’t trust anyone to answer. He cocked his head, trying to catch Anders’s eye.

It was always foolishness to ask a question one did _not_ wish to learn the answer to, or to which one already knew the answer; Fenris had come to understand that readily enough. Karl, being a man of some sense, should have known it too.

At his name, Anders glanced upward. A flicker of some distant but recognizable emotion crossed his face—it was a noticeable crack in the guarded mask Fenris had grown accustomed to seeing.

Anders licked his lips, tongue hesitating over a crack in the corner.

Then, absurdly, he attempted to smile.

‘Why don’t you come in and sit down?’ Karl said at once, stepping between them, putting a large, square hand to Anders’s shoulder. Anders stared at it, but didn’t flinch. ‘I’ll show you around, and… I don’t have any patients at the moment, so it’s really the perfect time to put on some tea, as well.’

Fenris stepped neatly to one side, allowing Karl to circumvent him as he led Anders to the nearest cot. It was an unexpected turn of events, but clearly they knew each other—or _had_ , at some point, in a far-off past. Fenris, never organized in his memories, attempted to recall what little he’d ever learned about Karl: he’d escaped the Fereldan Circle during the Blight; now, he lived as an apostate in Darktown, peddling his free wares in exchange for the loyalty and privacy that came with sharing such invaluable services. And that was it. All Fenris knew, and all he needed to know.

It wasn’t much. Certainly not enough to speculate on anything about Anders’s life before he’d had the misfortune of landing in Hadriana’s clutches.

It wasn’t any of Fenris’s business, anyway. Whatever their impact on one another’s lives, it did not affect _Fenris_ in the slightest.

‘I’ll leave the two of you to become…reacquainted,’ Fenris said, already turning. There was no point in inserting himself where he wasn’t needed, and the entire principle behind this afternoon’s endeavor had been to give Anders something that did not, at its core, require Fenris’s presence. ‘You may return to the manor when you see fit.’

 _Or not at all,_ Fenris thought, but chose not to add aloud. Karl was the sort to extend his hospitality not only to someone he knew; that Anders was a fellow Fereldan from before the Blight only heightened the odds. If Anders chose to accept that offer—to stay in this place where someone might, potentially, consider themselves of use—then it would be _his_ choice to do so, and not because of anything Fenris had suggested.

Neither Karl nor Anders stopped him on his way to the door. Fenris told himself he was satisfied, and didn’t turn to see them as he let himself out.

*

The tea smelled familiar, a Fereldan brew. Anders held the cup in his hands long after the heat had steamed out over his face, obscuring the clinic’s other smells.

They weren’t exactly dirty, though the place was dour and somewhat dank. Karl kept it up to the best of his abilities—to the best of anyone’s abilities, given its location—and Anders found moments of recognition in the faint hint of elfroot, sacks of them in the far corner, fresh soap and clean sheets. There was elfroot in the tea leaves, too, little shavings, to soothe the stomach and calm the mind. Anders sipped at it gently, but only once it cooled, to avoid burning his tongue.

‘There’s room for you here to help, if you want it,’ Karl offered. He was kind—much older, now, but just as comforting as before. He sounded the same, too, though Anders couldn’t be sure if his memories were accurate or he simply wanted them to be. The mind could play all kinds of tricks on its owner, after a time—but, with as many ghosts as it conjured from the grave, it never went so far as to make them brew a pot of tea.

Anders traced the rough wood with his fingers, the mug without a handle, the uneven lip sweating against his mouth. It was real, and the warm water settled in his chest, somewhere between his ribs and his stomach. That was the elfroot’s doing.

‘Needless to say,’ Karl added, ‘there’s no lack of work to be found here, usually from the mines. And, despite what I tell everyone else, I’m actually _not_ getting any younger. I could use an extra pair of hands around the place.’

Anders couldn’t help but get the impression he was being passed off again. Fenris didn’t want him—or rather, he didn’t want the creak of the bench in the morning, or the promise of Anders waiting for him in the foyer at night. He could do all the reading on his own, or have some friend visit and help him with the dwarf’s more verbose turns of phrase—and all without the mitigating factor of _Anders’s_ presence there, complicating things.

Anders stared into the dark contents of the cup, the leaves swirling at the bottom.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘Then again,’ Karl added, with what Anders _knew_ was an old touch of slyness—as though he was about to suggest they skip the boring theoretical bits and head straight on to turning enemies into icicles, ‘I can’t imagine anywhere is worse than Darktown—not even that place Fenris refuses to clean. Do you know, I don’t think he’s dusted in the past six years?’

Anders tried to imagine Fenris dusting. In his mind’s eye, incongruous as the picture was already, the rag caught on the sharp tips of his finger-guards, which in turn stuck into the soft wood of the banister. And so everything was ruined before it began.

‘…So perhaps it might be best if I recruited your services on a case-by-case basis,’ Karl concluded. ‘It’s a bit overwhelming to start out full-time. Kirkwall, City of Chains—and so many unavoidable injuries. All the weeping, the gnashing of teeth, not to mention the veritable encyclopedia of sores… I can’t imagine inflicting all that on someone straight off.’

There were times—few and far between, but therefore distinct, held separate in his mind—that Anders wished people wouldn’t be quite as kind as they were. The attempts might have been invigorating to someone else, someone better suited for the task of appreciating them. And appreciation _was_ a task, especially for a man like him, at this point in his life.

The tea was delicious, however. He always prescribed elfroot for a difficult stomach, searching through Hadriana’s vast storeroom for bandages and other ingredients—a storeroom that was even bigger than the clinic, which itself was more like a cave than anything, in this place so aptly called Darktown.

‘It’s all right,’ Anders said. ‘I think I bother him.’

‘Who—Fenris?’ Karl shook his head and rubbed at his beard. When Anders had last seen it, it only had a few, pale gray hairs hidden among the rest, at the time a faded, pleasant sort of red. ‘Hardly. That’s just his personality. Didn’t he tell you?’

‘It’s all right,’ Anders repeated.

‘Let’s get you back to Hightown, then,’ Karl said.

They hadn’t spoken about old times—in fact, they hadn’t spoken much at all. Anders was relieved, grateful, but the burden of his gratitude only intensified as he was escorted out of Darktown. He climbed the steps with a dread born of hopefulness—hope itself being the worst feeling to harbor at all.

Karl might have wanted to ask him why he was moving so slowly. But he didn’t, another gift Anders didn’t see that he deserved.

They passed through the Red Lantern district, and by Hawke’s Estate, set apart from the rest by the crest-shields that hung outside. Just past those walls, Anders knew, Orana would be cooking and cleaning, working her nimble fingers into every crevice of the scrolling woodwork in Hawke’s house until, properly polished, it gleamed. She’d mop _and_ sweep, do all the windows, and likely try to climb up onto the chandelier just to make sure it wasn’t harboring any suspicious cobwebs or fingerprints.

She made herself useful with an aggression she never displayed in any other walk of life; as such, she’d carved out an irreplaceable purpose for herself in Hawke’s household. Anders hadn’t managed to do that with Fenris. When he thought of Fenris’s mansion, and how it would look after even a _day_ of Orana’s services, he felt as hollow as a tin pitcher with a hole in the bottom.

No wonder Fenris had wanted him out of the house; Anders had made it so obvious that he wasn’t useful enough to do anything _in_ it.

Ascending the final staircase, leading upward to the manor district, Karl put a hand on Anders’s arm. He didn’t flinch away from the touch, although he wanted to, and some of it must have shown on his face.

‘You know where I am now,’ Karl said, simply. ‘If you need anything—no matter how foolish it might seem at the time—my door is always open. The lantern doesn’t need to be lit for old friends.’

Hawke had given him the same speech, or a variant of it, before he’d left Anders alone with the mushrooms on Fenris’s floor. It was a kindness particular to Fereldans, bluff and unselfconscious. In a great many ways they were like the mabari they so favored—but Anders had never known what to do with such open declarations of affection, not to mention so much slobber and drool.

He preferred cats. One never knew what they were thinking, and it was a difficult dance to remain constant in their affections.

‘Thank you,’ Anders said, because that was what Karl expected.

At the sight of the familiar, dilapidated mansion, Anders noticed his pulse beating beneath his chest, not particularly fast, but _present._ He didn’t think about what it meant, because the answer was all too likely: nothing.

‘I’ll see you again,’ Karl told him. Anders couldn’t remember whether he’d always had that easy confidence, or whether it was an artifact acquired later in life, something one cultivated only when his escapes worked out _right._ ‘And don’t trouble yourself about Fenris. He told Hawke I was a _viper_ the first time we met…or something along those lines, anyway. I forget the exact phrasing. Something poisonous. He has a bit of a problem with mages; no less difficult, for all it’s understandable.’ Karl glanced over his shoulder, a man accustomed to mischief, and walls with ears for every piece of gossip. ‘Believe it or not, he’s gotten a lot better over the years.’

Anders believed it. The Fenris he’d known in Tevinter had been far less articulate. He spoke, now—even when it was evident he didn’t _want_ to be speaking.

‘Thank you,’ Anders said again, throwing in a nod just to show he’d been listening. A curious little pinprick of something throbbed in his stomach; it took him a moment to realize that feeling for what it was, which was guilt. Karl had clearly been expecting something more from him—some shade of the man he’d known and taught in the tower, some sheen or texture of his legacy, _his_ help. But Anders had nothing to give him, because Anders hadn’t even kept enough of that man for himself. ‘…I’ll see you again, Karl.’

‘You will,’ Karl said, assuring himself, or both of them. ‘Soon, I hope. Take care of yourself, Anders.’

If they did see each other again, Anders thought—thought, but didn’t say—then it would only be because neither of them had anything better to do.

Karl left Anders alone to push open the main doors, creeping into the gloomy dark. The lock was never bolted, and the lamps were never lit. No one robbed the place because there was nothing to steal. At any given time of day, there was no way of telling whether Fenris was within or without—he wore no shoes, and kept his sword with him at all times, instead of leaving it by the door.

As Anders crossed the first floor landing, he noticed an odd smell—pleasant for once, instead of faintly sweet and tinged with rot, the particular scent of mold growing wild beneath the carpet. It was almost like roasted meat, which was strange, since Anders had never seen Fenris eat _anything,_ much less prepare it for himself.

His curiosity—meager and mild, but nonetheless remarkable—carried him up the stairs and toward the master bedroom. The fire was lit; Fenris _was_ within, sitting cross-legged in front of the hearth with a slab of red meat skewered on the fire-poker. There were black soot-streaks across his armor, and an ugly red burn on his left arm.

He looked up as Anders came in, even though he’d been so careful not to make any noise.

Anders wondered if he’d remembered—or thought—to clean the poker, before he put the meat on it.

‘We fought a dragon today,’ Fenris said, dipping the poker closer to the flames. At the very least, the fire would sanitize it. ‘Would you like to try some?’

*

Dragon-flesh tasted as one would expect, if one was in the habit of expecting such things.

With Hawke, they were par for the course, though even he looked at Fenris askance when they were divvying up trinkets. Gold for Isabela, of course, and the fire gland for Hawke, and scales for Karl. Hawke kept a claw to give to Merrill, and two others for his dwarves, and yet another for his dog to chew on. Fenris had no desire to keep these symbols of arcane power for himself, not out of superstition, but out of practicality. But his arm was aflame with the proof of their success, a burn all the way from his wrist to his elbow, and there was something to be said for the mementos of battles well-fought, and equally well-won.

He and Anders ate as much of said memento as they could stomach before they reconsidered, and read by candlelight instead, until the candle itself guttered out, and neither of them made a move to change it.

When Anders reached across in the dark to heal him, Fenris brushed his hand aside. An old habit, and an even harder one to break. Immediately, he regretted the action, but there was no taking it back, and he watched as Anders took his place by the fire, poking the embers that had all but burned themselves black.

In the morning, all signs of their heinous repast had been cleared away. Fenris wondered how Anders had managed to rise without waking him first, or if he’d even slept at all.

The day was full of its distractions. Hawke arrived, with the dog in tow. A brief stroll up Sundermount offered more revenants further along the peak; Merrill and Aveline joined them, each of them equally accepting of what proved to be just another afternoon in Hawke’s company, and it never occurred to any of them that the day after defeating a high dragon might be one for hard-earned respite.

It was good to live this way.

Fenris returned home not much past sundown, having been waylaid and sweet-talked—yes, he recognized it; and no, it was impossible to escape it nonetheless—into a few rounds of Diamondback at the Hanged Man. It was never possible to win when Varric was playing. Some grew tired of the charade more quickly than others, but still, it was the only place in Kirkwall that its Champion lost face.

‘I hope you understand this poor showing bears no reflection on the man who taught me the game,’ Fenris said, on his way out.

But all the others, caught up in their cards and their unpalatable drinks, found it humorous, or otherwise gave it no reply. That was their way—and it, too, was good.

The front door didn’t squeak when Fenris pushed it open.

That was neither good nor bad, but simply _strange_.

Stranger still was the little rug spread out before the entranceway. It had the faded look of something kept beneath dust, or bleached by the same persistent slant of sunshine for countless years. Fenris wrinkled his nose, and tread more carefully, making no sound as he crossed into the foyer.

The mushrooms, at least, were still in their proper place, between a whorl of blue and a block of red. The dyes had bled with the rain; the threads framed it like a little garden.

In the distance, the banister gleamed.

Fenris sniffed, with the same trepidation he’d felt when he brought the skewered dragon-meat to his nose. The same expression curled his lips as then, as well, turning ever downward as each detail followed the one before.

Something had gone wrong here. _Very_ wrong.

It wasn’t the sign of a skirmish or a broken window that disturbed him; those were acceptable, the constant details of this predictable place. Each room had its own familiarity, and nothing ever changed. Sometimes things broke, mantelpieces or window-frames, doors falling off their hinges in the night; the sound of rain falling through the ceiling onto the floor was part of the mansion’s distinct rhythm, the rotting wood a part of its charm. Others saw fit to comment on it as they chose, depending on their standards for free-living, but it was what Fenris knew best, a vile habitat to which he was at least accustomed. He knew it, every inch, from rugged mushroom to rickety stair. He certainly never expected it to clean itself.

Of course, it hadn’t. It couldn’t. In over six years, its ghosts had never once lifted a finger for cleaning, or anything that resembled the act.

And so it must have been someone else, the only other person who regularly frequented the dusty halls and side-rooms, since Fenris had never been _that_ particular _brand_ of slave.

He found Anders on the second floor, a sheet folded three times and wrapped around his waist like an apron. His hair was a mess, a streak of dust beneath one flushed cheekbone, tangled in a cobweb big enough a giant spider might just as well have spun it in the treacherous tunnels of the Deep Roads.

His eyes widened when he caught Fenris watching him—it was more of a reaction than he’d ever betrayed, though it was neither one thing nor the other, neither fear nor pleasure, nothing at all beyond surprise, which had no preference or judgment.

‘…I’ll be down in a moment,’ he promised, as if he had any control over the matter. His slender fingers tore at the spider-silk over his head, face falling as it clung to his hands and arms.

Fenris had the sudden urge to go over and tear him loose. The gauntlets he wore were far more effective in _destruction_ than mere hands, and he couldn’t help but be keenly aware of the fact that it was _his_ mess that was now causing Anders so much trouble.

Yet he hadn’t asked Anders to do this. And if Karl had suggested it, then Fenris was going to rethink every piece of advice he’d ever stewed on from _that_ apostate.

It was more difficult than he’d thought to simply remain where he was, unhelpful, frozen like a hapless bystander in one of Karl’s ice spells. Part of living free meant making your own mistakes. Perhaps Fenris’s greatest mistake was all around them now—allowing a fine mansion to sink into disrepair over the years, simply because he couldn’t conceive of looking after a thing for himself. _Himself_ was all he’d thought he needed—his body and a blade. But people didn’t live like that here. After seven years in Kirkwall, it was still something Fenris had to _remember_ , instead of knowing it instinctively.

With a delicate sound of filaments being torn loose from their moorings, Anders freed himself at last. Remarkably, he managed to bring the web down with him, and he wiped its remains on his apron, shoulders trembling with a satisfied sigh.

Fenris had never seen him so active, though he’d never quite moved past the idea that one day Anders would show initiative for _something._ But was _this_ it? He’d simply imagined—perhaps like everyone else—that what caught Anders’s attention would have been the clinic, and not…this. Whatever _this_ was.

The mansion was already practically lost to the elements. There was no reason to try and save something so long past the point of accepting or incorporating aid.

Now that he was finished—now that there was no immediate work to distract him—Fenris _felt_ Anders shrinking beneath his gaze. Down went his flushed head, his hands clasped together automatically in front of him, motes of dust in his tangled hair. The sight of it made Fenris’s skin crawl. He wanted to turn around and walk out the door, perhaps find another High Dragon to slay, just so he wouldn’t have to look back at the ex-slave living in his house and know that he didn’t have anything to offer him.

Fenris fumbled for the right thing to say. _Thank you_ would imply that he thought Anders had done all this for _him._ An arrogant response, and not one he could make without feeling ugly somehow, as though through a secret combination of body language and poorly chosen words he’d forced Anders into this particular course of action. It was true also that he felt boorish _not_ saying thank you, because even if Anders had not done this to serve Fenris, they would obviously both benefit from his improvements.

Fenris cleared his throat. Anders clenched fingers around fingers, knuckles going white.

‘This is…’ Fenris said, then blanked ferociously on what needed to come after. It was exactly like reading a sentence, then coming upon a word he didn’t recognize, and Fenris felt the same helpless frustration overtake him, boiling up from his chest, making his face feel hot beneath the skin and the lyrium. ‘You did not have to do this.’

‘I can’t fix everything,’ Anders said quickly. ‘The roof…’ He trailed off, looking toward the largest hole over the first-floor landing. There was another in the bedroom, countless more throughout the rest of the abandoned house. ‘I can _try,_ but I wouldn’t know where to begin.’

‘Don’t trouble yourself,’ Fenris told him. The last thing he needed was for Anders to go tumbling off the roof and break his neck out of some foolish notion of _obligation,_ the desire to finish a task once it was begun. ‘I will think of what to do for that.’

It hadn’t ever bothered him before, not even when it rained or snowed, but Fenris was no longer the only person living beneath so much brokenness. He had to make concessions. He _still_ hadn’t found the right thing to say. ‘…You left the mushrooms.’

Anders faltered. He reached for a rag—more dirt than cloth by now—and tried to wipe his hands on it. It was unclear which made the other slightly more dirty, if it served its task or rather defeated it. It was such a pointless thing, such a helpless motion. It reminded Fenris of everything that had ever plagued him in the past, the sense that any attempt he made toward change would merely protect the current balance. No matter how he tried to tip the scales, pushing too far in the opposite direction sent him right back to the way things were, the way they’d always been.

Sometimes, he still felt that way.

He was going to need more rags. _Clean_ ones. Hawke would know where they were found, or Karl. At the very least, Fenris could speak with Bodahn, impossible as most dwarves were to talk to.

‘…Yes,’ Anders said, very slowly. Then, because a long silence had transpired, and their conversations required the same amount of tending as the suffering mansion around them, he added, ‘I kept the mushrooms.’

Just to remind them what they were saying. How foolish the topic was, in retrospect.

‘I wasn’t sure if you wanted to keep them,’ Anders continued.

‘ _You_ wanted to keep them,’ Fenris said. It wasn’t entirely a question.

Anders looked troubled, that same furrow in his brow. The mess of his pale hair wasn’t quite enough to cover it, though it did deepen the shadow.

‘You like them,’ Fenris added, beginning to understand.

A long pause followed. Anders held tight to the rag. Fenris watched him with the same keen gaze he’d hated seeing from others so much in the past, because it came with the knowledge that he’d missed the mark completely—that he had no idea how it was to comport himself amongst people who no more understood the concept of unseen chains as they knew what it was like to be chained, themselves. Such a feeling was rare these days, though it did still come upon him occasionally. When he felt it, that sharp and sudden reminder, like the sting of a lash, he wondered at the nature of distance, the tricks of time, and if he’d ever truly be free from himself—because that was what mattered, more than being free from _other_ people.

Being free from them, however, did not hurt the cause.

Fenris cast about for something to soften that blow. The idea of liking anything, he recalled, was once more difficult than traveling from the Hundred Pillars all the way to the Free Marches. The latter was something a man could _do_. The former was something he had to _learn_.

And, Fenris had come to understand, _learning_ was not his strong suit. For some, it was quick and painless, handily immediate, readily apparent. For others, it was the arduous process of growing beyond one’s limitations, and it stretched and ached at the worst possible moments.

Then, while Fenris still struggled, still sought the right words to match their importance, Anders began to smile.

It was a slow thing at first, barely recognizable. It didn’t touch his eyes. But it did find very old lines around his mouth, and he rubbed at the corner with a dirty thumb, streaking soot along his skin, against the stubble.

He _did_ like the mushrooms. Fenris had been right.

There’d been a time Fenris would not have believed it, or rather, would have been offended, harboring a distinct need to know why. It was a strange preference, to be certain, but over time he’d come to recognize there was no end to strange preferences, not amongst the company he kept. Whatever they chose to like or dislike was a part of them, and it could no more be explained than their sense of self, cultivated through chance and experience, something allowed to grow and change over time. Varric did not _like_ to wear a beard. Hawke did not _like_ to lose at cards. Donnic _liked_ Aveline. Isabela _liked_ making people blush.

And Anders liked mushrooms, and Fenris liked wine.

‘Keep them, then,’ Fenris suggested, moving toward the master bedroom, to find the bed made and the window shut, what glass was still unbroken no longer gray with grime.

*

Anders knew he didn’t have to ask for consent to leave for a place Fenris had already granted him full permission to visit. _You may do as you please_ was as clear an instruction as any; it left no room for misinterpretation, while at the same time lacking all necessary specifics.

But it didn’t seem right to go somewhere without warning, or without even leaving a note behind.

There was a bottle of ink, but it was empty; there was a quill-pen, but it was broken; and there wasn’t any blank parchment at all, no scrolls of dusty vellum in the half-looted chests, hidden in all the rooms Anders had never thought to explore for any purpose other than cleaning.

Anders had to wait for the right moment—and right moments were few and far between in any man’s life, even more so in their lives.

Since he’d started cleaning the mansion, Fenris no longer sprang out of bed upon waking, leaving as early as he could without so much as a glance spared in Anders’s direction. While Anders would never presume to take credit for another person’s choices, he couldn’t help but feel that the improved conditions of their living environment must have had _something_ to do with Fenris’s new willingness to linger. It stood to reason, after all, that no one would want to remain any longer than necessary in a place that was falling apart around them.

There was the troublesome fact that Fenris had chosen to live here, that he’d cultivated this environment with more purpose than its byproduct—the mushrooms—but Anders didn’t dwell on that. He knew Fenris—or remembered him—better than Fenris realized, if not better than Fenris himself. He understood the reasons that might drive someone to live in squalor, or at the very least what would prevent someone from attempting to better his surroundings, his own situation.

Still, Anders tried not to think about it often.

They were still worlds away from having breakfast together at the same table, the way Hawke had tried to encourage, awkward conversation between Bodahn and Orana, Sandal staring at the far wall and the mabari begging for scraps around everyone’s ankles—but Fenris _loitered,_ prowling the master bedroom in the mornings while Anders made his bed, and he supposed that meant something all the same.

‘I thought I might go out today,’ Anders said, his back to Fenris as he fluffed the sad remains of a pillow. There were feathers in it still, but only a few of them. When he tried to plump it, it sagged instead, droopy, deflated. The casing bore multiple mended tears, as though Fenris had gone to bed still wearing his gauntlets, and each thrash had rendered new rips in the fabric. ‘To the clinic, I mean.’ He tried to remember his reasoning, something distinct and straightforward, something that made sense. ‘…Karl says there’s always work coming in from the mines.’

‘Yes,’ Fenris agreed. Anders noticed he was no longer allowing the silences to stretch out between them, but rather attacked them head-on with the same intensity Anders could only imagine he employed on his enemies. Fenris’s reflexes suggested a fighter who favored skill and speed over brute strength. Anders had seen him fight, once or twice, but not recently. A man’s style evolved over time, adapting to suit the needs of his aggressors. ‘The _Bone Pit_ is a cursed place. And yet Hawke is continually finding new reasons for us to travel there.’

‘That’s funny,’ Anders said. He didn’t laugh. Instead, he smoothed his fingers over the soft rise of Fenris’s pillow. He’d finished with the bed, but he still couldn’t bring himself to turn around. Not when this was going so well, and any sudden action on his part might spoil it. ‘You’d think, with a name like that, they’d be warning people to stay away.’

‘They _do_ warn them,’ Fenris said. ‘Hawke is…persistent, when it comes to helping others. Or persistent at the promise of more treasure. There are times when it proves difficult to tell which inspires him most.’

The information might prove useful. Anders told himself to remember it, just in case.

When he finally gathered the resolve to look over his shoulder, Fenris was already heading toward the door.

‘Give my regards to Karl,’ he said, shouldering the heavy length of his sword. ‘…I shall return before sundown, barring the likelihood of coming across any unforeseen _cursed objects._ ’ He paused. ‘We do that often.’

With that ominous portent imparted, Fenris was gone. It didn’t seem like encouragement, but it didn’t _feel_ like the opposite, either.

Anders recalled the way to the clinic in Darktown, just as Karl had assured him he would. Kirkwall, like the Imperium, had been built by slaves—but unlike the Imperium, it had been designed by dwarves. The streets were geometrical, but not necessarily in a common-sense sort of way.

Anders tied back his hair and attempted to sweep _most_ of the dust off his robes, but in the end he’d decided it didn’t really matter. From what he’d seen of Darktown, he’d still be the cleanest thing there.

Privately, he wondered whether Karl hadn’t become just a little bit peculiar, choosing to live down _there_ , of all places. Of course, it wasn’t Anders’s place to say. Most of the people Fenris knew—Fenris included—were just a little bit peculiar. Hawke lived with dwarves. Karl lived in Darktown. Fenris lived with dead bodies.

They were all strange.

When Anders arrived at the clinic some time later, the lantern was already lit. He knocked, and there wasn’t any answer; he pushed against the door, and was immediately swept up in a world of chaos. The clinic was full that day, no longer a peaceful, empty cavern of a place—a man with a bloody gash in his leg rested on one cot, and another with a bloodstained rag pressed to his head sat next to him. Further down the line was an enormously pregnant woman, her cheeks red and her skin dewy with a fine coat of sweat. She was breathing like she’d run a marathon to get there—the sight of her made Anders nervous indeed. To further compound the confusion, there was a handful of children underfoot; one of them stopped every so often to cough, great rasping wheezes that shook her entire little body.

At the center of it all was Karl, head and shoulders above the rest, directing everyone this way and that. He sounded confident, but none of his actions nor his composure seemed to make much difference.

When his eyes found Anders by the door, a look of unmistakable relief settled over his features.

‘Just in time,’ Karl said, as if this was something they’d planned. ‘Never fear, serah, my assistant has arrived—you still remember how to set a bone, don’t you, Anders?’

Anders didn’t remember, because he’d never forgotten.

The wounds he treated were neither more nor less ghastly than the ones he’d seen in Tevinter, Hadriana’s sports and pastimes being what they were. Perhaps there was something honest to them—although the way the men complained about the Bone Pit, Anders supposed most people never wanted to be hurt, and there were different methods for torment even throughout the Free Marches. Which were, by their own admission, _free_. There might have been a difference—slight, but important—injuring oneself with the prospect of payment, no matter how minimal, but it seemed to affect only how much the patient complained.

Patient. _Patient._ Or _pah-tee-ent._ There were so many different meanings for only one word.

The men of Darktown—the miners of the Bone Pit—could hardly be called patient, though they were Karl’s _patients_. They shouted and cursed, told jokes even as they hurled epithets Anders’s way, called him _healer_ and _bastard_ and _blighted nug-humper_ and _Andraste’s own blasted saint in disguise_ , and countless other things besides. It was a sort of gratitude, or at least a form of distraction. They shared dirty limericks just before they bit down onto cloth, so as not to bite off their own tongues. They spoke at length because they could, and the sound of their own voices seemed to comfort them against the pain.

Afterward, elfroot—to sooth the stomach, to calm the mind. Anders knew a different recipe for tea, and Karl asked him to brew it, which he did. The men who drank it called it worse than Corff’s piss, and finished every last drop, burning their tongues, wiping their mouths against their sleeves.

It lasted forever, or so it seemed. There were always more of them.

‘Do you see what I mean about Kirkwall?’ Karl asked, finally dimming the lantern for lunch.

In Darktown, there was no way to tell if they were early for something, or late. Anders sat on a crate in front of another crate across from Karl’s crate, not bothering to do as Karl did, and pick the fat off his meat.

After he’d finished eating, Anders went to light the lantern again, but Hawke was there in the doorway, waiting. Anders startled backward, and Hawke looked too distracted for apology. Behind him, Fenris inspected something on the bottom of his foot, otherwise occupied.

No unforeseen _cursed objects_ had befallen them, then. At least, not yet. They were in one piece—both of them—and Anders wondered why they’d come to a clinic at all. Certainly not for healing.

‘Ah,’ Hawke said, rubbing his beard between his forefinger and his thumb. ‘You’re just everywhere these days, aren’t you? Never mind. I’m on my best behavior for Fenris, you see. I take it from all the blood stains it’s been a busy day?’

‘The Bone Pit…’ Anders began.

Fenris scoffed. ‘Yes—the _Bone Pit._ Always the Bone Pit.’

Anders wondered if he’d said the wrong thing. It seemed to be a point of contention—not necessarily because he’d reminded them of it, but bringing something like that up was the opposite of obscuring it, which Anders privately knew was better than any other strategy.

Hawke didn’t seem angry. He did, however, appear very tired, wounded somehow, a gesture on the verge of becoming tragic. ‘Everyone’s always after me about the Bone Pit,’ he sighed. ‘As though it’s somehow _my fault_ beasts of arcane power are so drawn to spectacular treasure all the time. I didn’t make the rules; I only break them, as best I can, and kill all the giant spiders that try to stop me along the way. Karl’s too busy to spare today, I take it?’

It moved too quickly; each thread of thought was spun too fast to follow. Anders touched the side of his cheek, and his fingers came away wet with someone else’s half-dried blood, and Fenris _was_ watching him now, with a narrow gaze, unrepentant and unflinching.

‘Too busy for the Bone Pit,’ Karl shouted from within. ‘Although to be fair, Hawke, it feels like I’m already there, what with _all its miners_ coming to visit me this afternoon. I’m sure I’ll live without it somehow. Do keep me in mind for next time, though.’

‘Awful luck.’ It took Anders a moment to realize Hawke was addressing him in particular. ‘Some days you just _really_ need a healer, do you know what I mean?’

Anders had absolutely no idea, though something itched at his palms, and his chest felt tighter somehow.

‘Hawke,’ Fenris warned.

‘Fenris,’ Hawke replied cheerfully. ‘Something you want to say to me?’

Fenris did not have something he wanted to say to Hawke, it seemed. He returned to studying the bottom of his foot, dark with Darktown’s even darker dirt, though there was a narrowness to his expression, a tension in his jaw, that Anders—who’d spent so many hours closing petty cuts and knitting bone to bone—wished he could reach out and heal just as easily, beneath the fingertips of one warm hand.

‘Ah well,’ Hawke said, turning dramatically to leave. ‘I suppose we’ll just have to bring Aveline along and hope for the best. A woman-shaped shield she might be, but it’s just not the same as having a good _healing mage_ at your back.’

‘I’m a healing mage,’ Anders pointed out absently. The words were true. No one could fault him for speaking them. But he left off _good_ because that was relative, and relativity was dangerous.

Hawke paused where he was, halfway through a stride. Fenris scowled at his toes. ‘ _Really?_ ’ Hawke swung back around. ‘Oh yes—that’s right, isn’t it? And here I’d almost forgotten.’

‘He _is_ assisting Karl in his clinic,’ Fenris pointed out tartly.

‘There’s just so much to remember these days,’ Hawke replied.

‘I don’t mind,’ Anders said. He realized Karl might still need him, even if permission wasn’t strictly necessary between them. But they’d encountered a lull in heavy patient traffic, and Hawke seemed rather concerned about having a healer—or rather, not having a healer, as it turned out.

If Anders went along, perhaps he’d be able to tend to Fenris’s wounds _before_ they were aggravated somewhere along the way, with his refusal to tend to them until long after the blood had dried. It was a small thing, but it seemed important. If there was any room for Anders to improve, then he wanted to at least make the effort.

‘Well then,’ Hawke said, swinging a mighty hand and clapping him companionably on the shoulder. Anders nearly went over with the force of the blow. ‘That’s all settled, isn’t it? You’re a good man, Anders. Happy to have you on board. Everyone’s always complaining about the benefits, but you’ll find they’re only doing it out of love.’

Fenris tensed, then looked away, suddenly engrossed in something happening over by the far wall. He muttered a few hard words under his breath, but it was too quiet for Anders to hear.

‘You’re leaving?’ Karl called from the back of the room. ‘Well—good luck. I don’t mind saying you’ll need it—and you’re welcome back here whenever you tire of Hawke bossing you around.’

‘That’s not me,’ Hawke said, visibly affronted. ‘I don’t _boss._ I cajole—encourage, _persuade,_ convince. I help people see the truth they’ve always known but never suspected. I can’t help it if my skills are rather more effective than the average person.’

‘It’s fine,’ Anders murmured, to no one but his boots. The hard leather seemed to listen as well as anyone else in Kirkwall. ‘I’m ready now.’

‘Good man,’ Hawke repeated. Whatever grave injury of words he’d suffered mere seconds ago, he seemed to have recovered already. And without a healer, Anders noted. ‘It’ll all be worth it—you’ll see. Invaluable experience awaits in the Bone Pit. Not to mention treasure of inestimable value.’ He offered Karl and Anders both a bright smile, turning smartly on his heel to leave the way he came.

Fenris remained, hovering awkwardly in the doorway.

‘…Here,’ he said, and jerked toward something that had been leaning up against the outside wall of Karl’s clinic. He held it out the way someone might hold a dead fish. His tone conveyed the same distaste; he clearly didn’t want to be touching it. ‘You’ll need this.’

It was a staff—Anders recognized the shape immediately, even if he hadn’t held one of his own in years—carved from dark, solid wood, its length allowed to grow free-form at the top, no carvings to distort or change the branch’s natural shape. There were red leather handgrips bound around it near the base and crown, and it was sturdy, made to hold its own in battle, or at least give its wielder a chance at protecting his companions.

Anders stared, then realized he needed to reach out and take it. Fenris still held it like it burned him; perhaps, with each faint flicker of lyrium light, it _did_ burn. Yet Anders felt leaden with shock, as though—like some of Hadriana’s less fortunate slaves—he’d been transformed into a statue and left for the birds to perch on and peck at.

Somehow, after far too long, he managed to unclench his hands, wrapping stiff fingers around the length of the staff. It hummed faintly in his hands, luring his magic just as the song from Fenris’s lyrium tattoos beckoned.

 _Thank you,_ Anders told himself. That was what should come next, an exchange so obvious that even _he_ knew the lines by rote.

But his mouth was dry, his throat tight and his fingers tighter as they clenched around the staff—afraid someone might take notice of him and snatch it back, he knew he had to _hold on_.

‘Come,’ Fenris murmured. He sounded weary; Anders had no way of knowing what they’d spent the morning doing, or what they planned on doing next—or why Hawke found it necessarily to return to the Bone Pit when he’d seen for himself the damage it could do. ‘He will not wait forever. He cannot be left alone.’

Wordlessly, Anders followed. For the first time since he could remember, it bothered him that he hadn’t spoken up.

*

Fenris had known—his hand still buried to the wrist in the blood mage’s chest, while Hawke casually appropriated his staff—the nature of what came next. He’d known, but that hadn’t helped, if only because he hadn’t also known how to prevent it from happening.

Anders was _not_ a child—and it was _not_ Fenris’s place to protect him—but he felt the burden of that responsibility nonetheless. Anders hadn’t been a bodyguard, a slave trained to fight for the protection of his master, but rather the opposite, someone forced to clean up after Hadriana’s cruel messes. He saw injury only after it was inflicted. He did not know the way of it.

Fenris had little desire to expose Anders to further violence, but he could no more argue with Hawke than he could with wind and rain. The man was a force of nature unto himself, and where he went, Fenris saw fit to follow.

The staff, at least, was no less a weapon than a sword, though magic forged its heft, rather than the fire and the anvil. Fenris could tell himself that—even if it did not amount to much, in the greater tapestry of his collected wrongs.

‘I swear, Hawke,’ Varric said, stepping through a clump of bright-green ferns in one of the caverns above the mine-site, ‘I’m beginning to think you like gold more than I do. And _I’m_ a dwarf, lest we all forget. I thought we’d pretty much cornered the market on greed—yet here we are. _Again._ ’

‘Here we are again,’ Hawke concurred, an absurd grin distorting his sober features. ‘Do you hear that _scuttling,_ Fenris?’

An unnecessary question. Fenris responded in the only way he knew how, with no further banter. He was the first into the tunnels; as the vanguard, he eclipsed any imperative need for a scout.

There was only one beast that _scuttled_ so, and after seven years of living in this place, they all knew the signs too well. _Spiders_. Giant ones; Kirkwall had an endless supply of them. Some cities had rats, and others pigeons, but Kirkwall’s infestation of spiders was one of its more charming qualities. Or so Varric often said, in the books.

The books had no place here, nor did worrying after mages with staffs in hand, healers untested on the field of battle. Even when the field was nothing more than a narrow mine-shaft, Fenris still thought of it as such, and dealt each blow accordingly—though in such tight quarters, it was prudent to adjust the scope of his swings.

The volley of cross-bolts, the clash of daggers, and the sweep of Fenris’s blade—some days he knew this dance better than the back of his own hand, or at the very least, it proved more natural to him. There was even room enough for the shock of arcane fire, or some frozen volley from behind, though Karl’s force spells often proved more of a distraction, as the earth shook beneath the soles of Fenris’s feet.

To say nothing of the slim pulse of dread when _Merrill_ drew her power from her blood, to cast each dank spell—so much a part of nature, and yet so much an act made against it.

But neither Karl nor Merrill was with them today. Instead, the faint pull of Anders’s magic in the tunnel at Fenris’s back tugged at the lyrium beneath his skin.

Fenris knew his target. He succumbed to it.

He did not revel in the kill, not with the mindless beasts. When they were sundered by a well-timed blow, their bodies rent to shreds and blood and skittering legs in fuzzy little pieces. Their death-calls filled the tunnels to bursting, sent dirt and stone filtering down from above in a chaos of murder and frenzy. It simply _was_. There was no pleasure in it. Fenris did what he must, for no reasons personal or otherwise, save that one must live and one must die. Were this a slaver’s den, some hollow place of ancient wrongs never made right again—if their enemies stood on two legs, and called to one another with words of camaraderie and warning—then it would be different.

But it was not different. And there was no room for speculation in a simple fight.

When it was finished, pincers still shuddering in the darkness, Fenris watched Anders hold one hand over Hawke’s back, between his shoulders and just below the nape of his neck, where some poisoned claw had sunk in deep. Hawke weathered it easily as always, the glow from the mage’s palm causing him no undue distress, and when Anders smoothed the torn and bloodied fabric with his fingertips there was a gentleness, an intimacy in the action that made Fenris burn where he stood.

‘Still glowing, elf,’ Varric pointed out.

‘Your reminder is unnecessary, dwarf,’ Fenris replied.

At times, it seemed the names were almost fond. At others, they reminded Fenris only of when they were _not_. Still, neither of them was truly wary around the other anymore. Perhaps they’d simply forgotten the way of it, or had grown weary with _that_ particular dance. There were so many others far more pressing, demanding practice on a daily basis.

The light went out, and the tunnels were dark. There were always more enemies to be found, treasures only Hawke could sense glittering in some imagined distance, and they all attended, for their reasons, caught up in the current that surrounded him.

Now Anders, too, was counted amongst that number. Fenris told himself it was for the best, that no amount of freedom could be felt without the presence of danger, and those nearby to confirm it. Companionship, reaffirmation, strangers who became acquaintances and acquaintances who became friends. What else would Fenris have him do? Stay in that mansion alone to rot, just like another one of his corpses?

That was no freedom.

Surely—if not _for the best_ —this was still _for the better_.

‘Magnificent,’ Hawke said. ‘You know, it’s champions like _you_ lot who keep a Champion like _me_ going. Couldn’t do it without you. Wouldn’t do it without you, either—that would just be _suicide_ , the odds of which I’ve never really appreciated.’

He had an easy way of talking to people. Even if it overwhelmed, it also soothed, a contradiction in terms, but a working one. There was no man who wasn’t somehow taken by the charisma of his natural charm, and Anders, it seemed, lingering close to him, still checking for other signs of injury, was no exception.

Once again, Fenris reminded himself of the nature of jealousy—how it made itself known for the most worthless of reasons, and how those reasons grew beyond the capacity for reason itself. The smallest piece of it so easily spoiled into infection. And, Fenris knew, he was not _jealous_ of Hawke. He accepted each of their abilities as they stood, separate, at far ends of the mine-shaft.

It was not jealousy he felt. But it was…something.

Fenris flicked the blood off his blade, and suggested they should move on.

Ten spiders or a hundred spiders later, it didn’t matter. Chests with nothing in them, or chests full of unimpressive trinkets—Fenris knew that Hawke was here not for the profit but for the miners, to see if he couldn’t be the one to turn all broken things to right again.

His motives were as transparent as his greed. Sometimes Fenris wondered whether Hawke was aware of this, or if he was as shortsighted as the rest of them when it came to personal flaws.

Either option seemed a distinct possibility. Sometimes _both_ was not out of the question.

They unearthed a nest of dragonlings in the far depths of the mines, and Fenris shouted a warning this time before diving into the fray—alerting any mages who might have been staring at their boots or admiring deposits of drakestone that now was the moment to be on their guard.

As always, they defeated the beasts with very little to show for it; Hawke sheared off fresh scales while Varric jimmied the last chest open with nothing more than a pair of straight pins he’d produced from his sleeve. Fenris settled himself against the nearest wall to catch his breath and wait for the others to conclude their business.

Gradually, he became aware of Anders hovering in the periphery of his vision, trying to make out in the dim cave-light whether Fenris was in need of healing.

‘I’m fine,’ Fenris croaked. He cleared some of the hoarseness from his throat; battles were always a haze for him, and once he disappeared beneath the shimmering veneer of lyrium he became a ghost—one with a propensity for howling blood-curdling battle-cries to the sky, if Hawke’s grievances could be believed. Fenris never remembered it, but the complaints of his body served as reminder enough.

Anders nodded, then ducked to fiddle with something beneath the layers of his outer robe. He came up with a full water-skin, one Fenris recognized instinctively as having belonged, once, to Varric. ‘You should drink, at least. Though it’s water, not wine.’

Something shivered unexpectedly through Fenrsis’s skin at the sight of Anders’s apologetic look—as though not bringing the resources to get Fenris drunk on the job was an offense worthy of rebuke—but it was no more than a flickering ribbon of good humor, the kind Fenris only ever felt during his card games with Donnic, whenever the man made an unexpected joke.

Fenris took the flask quickly, pressing its mouth to his lips before they could quirk and betray his smile.

He’d come long past the point of feeling like he needed to hide every one of his expressions from his companions, but his own instincts for continued privacy, in the face of such constant interference, was a difficult habit to break.

Anders slipped away through the shadows before Fenris could muster the fortitude to thank him, but there was a hint of gratification written across his features, unmistakable even underground. Whether or not Fenris actually managed to _say_ anything at all seemed to matter very little.

‘Well now,’ Varric said, his sudden voice echoing through the stone alcove, and startling Fenris from his contemplation. ‘I’d say a good day’s work deserves a good day’s _reward_ tacked onto the end of it. What do you think, Hawke? Should we sell off some of this junk and head to the Hanged Man?’

‘Varric, have I ever told you how much I _love_ the way your mind works?’ Hawke asked. ‘And here I was wondering what Bodahn would say if I came home with three more moth-eaten scarves and a pair of torn trousers for the chest.’

Out of the corner of his eye, Fenris saw Anders dart a quick look at Hawke’s own trousers, not yet understanding the depths their leader would sink to when it came to gathering loot.

‘The Hanged Man,’ Fenris repeated. He tried, in his way, to discern whether it was something Anders would enjoy, or whether it might not be better for him to leave the day as it stood, after so much excitement.

‘I’m _not_ taking no for an answer.’ Hawke favored Fenris with his least favorite measuring look. ‘Besides—how can you deny Anders the pleasure of tasting Corff’s whiskey for the first time?’

Put like that, Fenris supposed he couldn’t. But he kept a close eye on Anders all the way back to the city, watching for any sign of discomfort.

At the first hint of displeasure, they would leave.

They made their way to the Hanged Man, cacophonous center for filth and disorderly behavior, the locus for all their private entertainment, for whatever reason. Because, apparently, _most_ of them enjoyed it, and in this case, the majority—with Hawke’s backing—won the day.

Fenris drew closer to Anders as they crossed the threshold, lowering his voice and raising his head, the better to put his mouth near Anders’s ear.

‘Do not touch anything unnecessarily,’ he suggested. ‘And do not leave your drink unattended, either.’ When Anders’s brows lifted in question, Fenris sighed. ‘Someone—someone like Isabela—might well put something in it,’ he explained.

More than all the other, littler things, he did not relish this.

*

The last time Anders had been inside the Hanged Man—he wondered why they called it that, but didn’t voice the question—it had been mid-day, sunlight streaming in through the high-set windows, only its most dedicated regulars in attendance. Now, it was evening, and it might as well have been a different place: full to the brim with raucous laughter and even more raucous patrons, whiskey-stains drenching the floor as dark as blood. In some spots, Varric told him, it really _was_ blood; Anders wondered if Danarius’s yet remained, a part of the ambiance, a part of the very floorboards beneath them.

They all had their places, their chairs, a part of a bench or a stool they sat on habitually—Varric slid into seat at the head of the table, while the others arranged themselves comfortably around him. Anders remembered them all, each name and each face, and some betrayed shock when they saw him, while others, nobly, didn’t. But it was all the same, in the end; they could pretend all they liked they were surprised to see him stained with spider’s blood and not surprised for any other reason, but that wasn’t the real explanation for each shift in their expressions.

One more in this place was hardly noticeable. It was a sizable crowd. But one more at the table _was_ noticeable, and even when Fenris rearranged himself tightly along the bench, there was only just enough room for Anders to perch on the edge beside him, with the heels of his hands against his knees, his tankard of ale in constant jeopardy of being knocked, by someone’s elbow, off the table.

It seemed very silly for a man who’d fought giant spiders and dragonlings in the depths of a place called the Bone Pit—which Anders first knew of vaguely, from everyone else’s reactions, the patients at the clinic, and of course the occasional mention in _Hard in Hightown_ —to be more daunted by a simple taproom than he was by the prospect of his own potential death in the mines, torn to strips of flesh and muscle on claws from an arcane bestiary.

Anders recalled the scent of charred dragon-flesh—how difficult it proved to cook; how long it took to cool afterward—and pressed his knees more closely together, feeling the grind of bone, the bruising of flesh, the texture of roughly-woven thread pressed against his skin.

‘Well?’ Varric said. The dwarf was staring at him, beardless and expectant. ‘Drink up! It’s not like it’s poison.’

‘Actually, Varric,’ Hawke said, ‘that’s debatable. It _might_ be poison,’ he added, for Anders’s sake, ‘but the _slow_ kind. Nothing dramatic. Just a part of life.’

‘ _Do_ drink up,’ Isabela added. ‘I want to see your face when you taste it for the first time.’

‘You think it’s going to taste like it smells,’ Karl agreed. ‘But then, somehow, it really doesn’t.’

‘You almost wish it did,’ Aveline confirmed.

Merrill smiled, eyes growing ever larger as they remained, somehow, unblinking. ‘I threw up my first time,’ she confessed. ‘All over the floor! All over a raider, too. And he was _very_ angry about it. But Isabela said it was magnificent—the best she’d ever seen. So I suppose I did all right by myself, in the end. Even though I thought it would be terrible.’

‘You do not have to drink it,’ Fenris said. Of everyone at the table, he was the only one not looking in even Anders’s general direction. Something on the far wall had caught his interest, and for a long time, though when Anders followed his gaze, he saw nothing there. ‘ _I_ do not drink it.’

‘I used to think it was an elf-thing,’ Varric mused. He rubbed at his jaw, and the stubble there made a comforting sound. ‘Not wanting to go against nature or some other kind of fancy Dalish bullshit. But then Daisy came along, and _she_ drinks it just fine. So it must be a _broody_ thing.’

Anders felt, all at once, overwhelmed and pleasant, drunk already on something he couldn’t name. The smell from the tankard was vile; it was worse than any deep mushroom and elfroot potion combined, and it mixed with the stink of leather and perspiration, stale sawdust swept over the floor to mask other aromas. The closer it came to his lips the more it overpowered him; he heard a gurgle in his stomach as he braced himself, and felt the bench shift beneath him as Fenris leaned forward.

‘It’s practically a rite of passage, Fenris,’ Hawke was in the midst of reasoning. ‘And he’s a _very_ good healer. Best I’ve ever had—no offense, Karl, really.’

‘I’m a force mage, you know,’ Karl returned dryly. ‘So rather: none taken.’

Anders was aware of this burden, the necessity to prove himself capable. Even if he vomited everywhere after he’d finished, like Merrill—and there was the distinct possibility such a thing might happen—simply going forward with it would mean… _something_. He glanced, briefly, over his shoulder—to see if Fenris was mad, or uninvolved, or unimpressed, or moody, any of the most likely possibilities—but their eyes met, and Anders clutched the tankard, and Hawke slammed his fist down on the table, causing Isabela to reach over it and hit him in the side of his head, while ruffians at other tables caught sight of her doing it, and cheered.

‘You’ll never taste anything so vile,’ Fenris muttered. It was meant for no one else—only for Anders.

Anders wrinkled his nose. It probably couldn’t taste worse than it smelled, but then, Aveline didn’t seem like a lying sort of person. She didn’t have the face for it, and Anders had known a thousand types of liars in his time, a thousand ways to lie.

He pressed in closer against Fenris on the bench, dug in his heels to steady himself, then tipped the tankard bravely forward. The sudden rush of liquor burned his throat on the way down, fire spreading through his nose and all the way to his belly. It _didn’t_ taste as terrible as it smelled, if only because Anders could no longer taste _anything_ at all. Corff’s brew had numbed his tongue, possibly damaging it beyond repair. Anders wondered whether _terrible whiskey_ was an ailment that was within a spirit healer’s ability to cure, then banished the thought; years in Tevinter under an exacting master had trained him out of the habit of healing himself.

A shudder rippled through his body, and Anders felt Fenris there behind it, the sharp framework of his armor as he sat steady beside him, providing a bracer of support. Anders leaned tentatively back against him, expressing gratitude without actually using his words.

Fenris seemed to prefer that kind of silent communication. And it was easier to pull off when Anders’s mouth was full.

He managed to swallow a good amount of whiskey down before his stomach and chest rebelled, forcing him to pull away before he began to cough. Throwing up was one thing, but spraying liquor all over Fenris’s companions, Isabela and Merrill and Aveline across the way, merely because he couldn’t manage his own limits was quite another.

He _could_ manage his limits. He knew every last one of them.

Isabela was the first to clap, although Hawke took up the torch enthusiastically enough, sparking a round of applause. Anders spluttered, his face red from the drink, red with the amount of attention he was currently receiving, a hot blush that crept all the way from his cheekbones to his throat, beneath the tight clasp of his collar.

But Fenris bowed his head and kept his hands firmly on the table, sharp metal talons digging into the soft wood.

In the wake of this triumph, Anders remembered the last time they’d been in the Hanged Man together; he remembered being collared to the bed, and Danarius’s fresh blood soaking Fenris’s gauntlet, staining his hands. It seemed like another lifetime ago now—Anders registered dim surprise at the concept. It had been years since he’d felt or thought about the passage of time. Every day was so much like the one that came before it, after all, and there was no reason to imagine he’d ever find anything to color the days that stretched out before him, like so much gluey porridge.

Until Hadriana grew tired of him, until Danarius grew tired of him, or until his new master did. Until he finally starved, or froze, or gave up one unremarkable day, for no grounds other than he couldn’t bear the idea another would follow it. People died for such ordinary reasons. They relinquished themselves, lost all want. Weariness outweighed their fear of death, and they simply disappeared. Anders had watched them do it, trying to tend to them, trying to save them.

The whiskey twisted in his belly. Beneath the table, Fenris’s knee brushed his.

‘You do not have to finish that,’ Fenris told him, quietly. Not quietly enough, since the statement drew Hawke’s attention, and he let out a jolly laugh.

‘He does if he’s going to take on Varric in Wicked Grace tonight,’ Hawke said. ‘In fact, _everyone_ needs a bit of liquid courage before approaching that bloody massacre. Sometimes I don’t know why we bother. We must secretly love the agony of defeat.’

Fenris _tsked_ while Anders attempted to parse the phrase. Wicked Grace was a card game he’d played in Ferelden, with meager success and excessively large damage done to his ego. If he’d been that bad then, he couldn’t conceive of playing it now. He didn’t know the rules. He barely remembered the cards.

‘Are we playing again tonight?’ Merrill asked. Anders hadn’t noticed her drinking, but there were roses in her cheeks that hadn’t been present a moment ago. ‘I wish I’d known—I’d have brought something to barter when I lost.’

‘No gambling,’ Aveline said. The tenor of her voice cut neatly through Anders’s whiskey-haze so effectively that he practically felt sober again. It gave him the courage to lift his tankard once more, helping himself to a liberal swallow.

He didn’t like the taste. But it was strong, and he didn’t hate it, either.

‘ _Rats,_ ’ Isabela muttered. ‘And here I thought you were off-duty tonight.’

‘I’m _guard-captain,_ ’ Aveline replied, tone as steely as the armor she wore. It matched, in some capacity, the armor that Fenris’s friend Donnic was always going about in. ‘I’m _never_ off-duty. It’s not a position I can hang up at the end of the day, alongside my shield.’

Anders let the chatter wash over him, neither ignoring the conversation, nor involving himself directly in it. It was a novel sensation, and—like the warmth he’d harbored when Fenris had accepted his water in the caverns—he wanted only to sustain it in whatever way he could. Nurture it, like a hand cupped over a flame—or a wayward mushroom in the carpet.

The other slaves at Hadriana’s villa never had much energy for empty talk at the end of the day—and Fenris had proven much the same, on the rare occasions Anders found himself alone in the elf’s company. But at the Hanged Man, it seemed that _everyone_ had something to say, and they all wanted to be the first ones to say it. A race had broken out, in the form of a scuffle, Hawke and Isabela tussling like two well-fed kittens, both of them touching each other inappropriately in the chaos.

It was interesting, like watching characters come to life off the page. And these _were_ the characters from _Hard in Hightown_ , more or less—the broad, basic strokes of them, with little details filled in between the lines. They were loud, and alive, and good to one another. They were trying to be good to him.

Even if Anders quickly proved himself to be just as terrible at cards as he’d anticipated.

More whiskey helped to cushion his embarrassment, but it did nothing for his skills.

‘Do not trade your cards out so often,’ Fenris advised. They were sitting so close to one another that it was difficult for Anders _not_ to see his hand, the little faces and the diamonds against his finger-guards, but he did his best anyway, before he caught Varric watching _him_.

‘It isn’t his fault,’ Hawke moaned, throwing out all his cards across the table, then throwing his arms high in the air. After that, he deflated—a very contrary man, with a much louder contrariness than Fenris regularly displayed. Anders already knew which he preferred. ‘He’s sitting next to Varric. Of course he’s going to lose.’

‘You’re not sitting next to me, Hawke,’ Varric pointed out, ‘and _you’re_ still losing. How about that?’

‘Ah, Varric.’ Hawke smiled, showing too much teeth. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. For once. You see—I’ve lost already.’

Varric won—it seemed that was what everyone expected—with Karl second, and Fenris third. It appeared that Hawke’s impatience, his keen anticipation of the inevitable, was why he didn’t go further, and Isabela was touching Merrill beneath the table, distracted, while Merrill was simply terrible, and Aveline too offended by all the cheating to focus on her own playing. Anders was somewhere comfortably in the middle, the drink adding colors to everything; he told no one his thoughts, so they wouldn’t be able to improve, and Fenris came in second the next time around—which was, Hawke said as Fenris scoffed, as good as winning, since Varric didn’t count, because Varric was a given.

*

They left as soon as they were able; at last, Fenris knew why some felt the need to apologize for their friends. He’d never seen the purpose of such a thing until now; he’d simply assumed that a man’s actions were his own, and that was the extent of his accountability.

Unless, of course, he was at fault for introducing them to some unsuspecting party. Then, he had keen reason for accepting the responsibility of _their_ actions _as_ his own.

It would have been unnecessary, if they’d known how to behave themselves. But they didn’t—anything else would have diminished them—and Fenris’s reprove was the same as Hawke’s ceaseless complaining. In some manner of speaking, it betrayed fondness.

They were difficult—no more than Fenris was difficult, he supposed, but it was the _way_ in which they were difficult that seemed to matter most. If only they were sometimes less vocal about their advice, or their unnecessarily vivid interpretations.

‘You’d better take Blondie over there home,’ Varric had said knowingly. ‘Before somebody else does. You know this crowd.’

As always, the suggestion was unsolicited. It was offered anyway, and sometime after that—perhaps too soon after it, allowing Varric to be smug—Fenris followed it.

Kirkwall at night was never safe. Yet, for some reason, no one saw fit to trouble him on the streets any longer.

The house was dark. Anders swung in a wide arc toward the stairs to avoid, Fenris presumed, stepping on the mushrooms. The sound of his footfalls up the steps drifted toward the broken ceiling—still not fixed. Fenris followed him, the little noises filling the house more effectively than silence ever had.

Fenris removed his gauntlets; Anders lit a candle. They moved around one another but not _with_ one another, not in the same way Fenris fought beside Hawke and the rest. Fighting made each gesture more simple, giving them all patterns that fit cleverly into purpose. One knew where to step, and where not to step. One did not have to guess.

But guess-work was all either of them had now. Fenris watched Anders light the fire without magic, and felt guilty for it, but he’d seen no need—perhaps he should have.

Then, crouched by the hearth, Anders paused to fuss with his sleeve, to fix the fall of his hair, and finally, to warm his hands.

Fenris cleared his throat. Reactions slowed by Corff’s poison—for that, Fenris believed, was _exactly_ what it was—Anders almost forgot to jump, then did so anyway, bootheel scuffing against the worn rug.

It seemed that every time he remembered he was _not_ alone, it wounded him in some new way. Yet, Fenris had to acknowledge, it was only the visible act of loneliness interrupted by some other presence—not a crowd, but a _pair_ of people—that troubled him. In the Hanged Man, he hadn’t seemed half so wary; so why, then, was it that a group of insufferably loud people were far less noticeable than one insufferably _quiet_ one?

A puzzle for another time. Perhaps it had no answer.

Still, the silence had lasted too long. It would prove more difficult now to reverse it.

‘Shall we read?’ Fenris suggested, his throat dry. He didn’t have the way of it that Hawke had, the ability to make an idea seem like the right one, even when it wasn’t. Dissembling and bluster were both equal talents. Fenris was no rogue, and rarely wished to be one—though he did wonder, with his usual lack of imagination, what it might be like under the right circumstances.

Anders brushed his hair from his eyes. ‘Of course,’ he said.

Even after all this study, Fenris still questioned whether or not he meant it. There was still the chance he said only what he thought Fenris wanted to hear, and not knowing was worse than any unpleasant answer.

Anders came to sit beside him, still smelling of the Hanged Man, sawdust in the feathers at his shoulders, a whiskey stain on his sleeve. When he noticed it, he frowned, rolling the fabric up along his arm. The freckled back of his hand gave way to a delicate wrist, and something red, _old_ revealed itself, something Fenris had never seen.

‘What is that?’ he asked, and reached toward it, if only to keep it from disappearing.

Anders cringed, but he didn’t move away. Fenris tugged at the fabric of his sleeve, gentle as he knew how to be with gauntlets shielding and sharpening every finger.

It was an old scar, twisted into an unnatural shape—the large ‘F’ unmistakable even to someone with Fenris’s meager reading skills. It was the first letter in his name.

It also stood for _fugitivus,_ a word Fenris had heard countless times, but had never seen spelled. Hadriana’s slaves _did_ run on occasion—she liked them ‘spirited’, presumably because it suited her better to subjugate those who still remembered what it meant to have pride. Danarius had preferred total obedience; Fenris had never escaped, save for the very end. The idea had never even occurred to him, a thought that rankled even to this day.

Fenris drew his thumb over the letter, careful to angle his fingers so that the curved metal would not scrape Anders’s wrist. Beneath his touch, Anders shivered, and Fenris heard him swallow, the sound awkward and stilted in the back of his throat. Sometimes, a man forgot to swallow.

Anders’s fingers twitched toward his palm. Fenris waited for the rebuke, for Anders to pull his arm back or slide away.

He did neither.

‘You ran,’ Fenris said. He traced the three lines over, remembering the way he’d learned to write them. Like three broad sword cuts, one down and two across. Any letter was a series of strokes; any series of strokes could be practiced with a sword as well as a quill. And so Fenris had learned, slowly, to write.

Anders drew in a ragged breath. ‘…Yes.’

Abruptly, Fenris felt ashamed of his curiosity. It was an obvious question, something that didn’t bear discussion. Not now. What did it matter, if Anders had run? What good would it do him to dwell on that here? Just because he was gentle, a state of being so foreign to Fenris that he could barely conceive of its origins, that didn’t mean he deserved to be taken advantage of in such a way. Fenris would never allow anyone to touch _him_ like this. Not Isabela; not even Hawke.

He made to draw his hand away, but Anders moved quickly, catching onto Fenris’s forearm where skin and armor met. His touch was hesitant, his fingers cool. Fenris watched them move along the rise of his armor, then shift to Fenris’s skin. The muscles in Fenris’s arm contracted sharply, but he held himself in place, not willing to draw away when Anders had finally expressed his first real preference. And his own fingers were still on Anders’s arm, at the most vulnerable part, right above the pulse.

It would be hypocritical— _dishonorable,_ even—not to afford the very courtesy he’d been shown.

They were the same, here. Actions could prove that, even more than words.

‘I never ran,’ Fenris said, speaking to distract himself from the inevitable. It was an art he understood now, from years of watching Varric and Hawke employ the same techniques. The words themselves were more than a diversion, however. They were also something Anders needed to know. And that was where Fenris differed from his friends. Words were precious; to speak them freely, even more so. He would not waste them just because he could. ‘Even at the end—that escape was an accident, caused by…some other impetus. I did not know of the world outside Danarius. I didn’t understand what I was missing. Not at first. Only that I was not happy.’

The soft pads of Anders’s fingertips finally found their mark, grazing over one of the lines of lyrium buried deep beneath Fenris’s flesh. He hissed, and Anders drew away as though _he_ was the one who’d been burned—as though Fenris’s skin was truly as warm as it felt, hot enough to scorch another at the faintest touch.

‘Does it hurt?’ Anders asked.

Fenris could feel the muscles and tendons twitching in his arm, the uncertainty he bore, and his unwillingness to retreat completely. It was a new sensation. There was a time when Anders would have been back across the room now, tail between his legs like Hawke’s mabari.

Fenris didn’t know which reaction he was more comfortable with.

He _did_ know which he preferred.

‘The ritual undertaken to leave me with these markings was…painful,’ Fenris said. His eyes were on the brand—F for _fugitivus._ Even as a slave, Anders had been gifted with a kind of bravery, an independence Fenris himself had never known. He couldn’t remember if _he’d_ ever had it. And he’d killed the only person who might have been able to help him try. _Varania._ His dear sister. ‘It lingered long after. I do not— _like_ to be touched.’

It occurred to him only afterward that he hadn’t exactly answered Anders’s question. Worse still was that Anders seemed to know it.

Anders didn’t lower his hand, though his fingers twitched lightly in the air just above the tight extensor muscle in Fenris’s forearm. Fenris could still feel the pulse beneath the pale and twisted scar, pressed against the pad of his thumb, the pull of even the most hesitant magic against his veins of lyrium.

Aside from the initial pain—after that had faded, into the creation of his new body and his only past—the second pulse was what woke him in the night, eyes darting through the darkness, unsure of where his heart was, if it was still working. And Danarius would curve his fingers in the air and pluck at that pulse, each lyrium vein a separate string pulled taut by magic’s hand. They had a certain parallel, one born solely to exploit.

Yes—the pain was a given. Danarius had shown him what it meant, in every way possible.

It had been a long time since he’d allowed himself to think of the man—now that he was dead, there was no reason to afford him the courtesy of memory. And so, too, was Varania placed within the confines of that same understanding—that the dead should stay buried, not simply beneath the ground, but in one’s thoughts as well. They were gone. Fenris knew this.

Fenris also knew that he did not like to be touched because of his experiences, but probing deeper, he recalled that all his experiences of being touched, as far as he knew them, were bound up in _Danarius_ yet again. He could go no farther back than that; there was nothing else he _did_ remember. His preferences, who he was, had been formed the same way a statue was carved or a weapon forged, with chisel and anvil, with fire and vision. He afforded the rest of the world no chances because he saw Danarius wherever he went, Danarius’s palm against every palm, Danarius’s gaze in every shadowed eye. What he knew was never as important as why he knew it. There were times when, tracing the path he’d taken from the Imperium to this City of Chains—a network of roads like a network of veins—he could not escape the reality of his own beginning. _Danarius_ , always, greeted him.

It was wrong—it was not supposed to be this way. There _had_ been closure. He _was_ his own man.

 _Fenris knew this._

‘Does it hurt now?’ Anders asked. His voice was gentle. Fenris barely even heard it over the labored sounds made, internally, by his own brain.

They settled. _He_ settled. His eyes came to focus on Anders’s fingers, soot under the nail, a crack in his thumb stained brown with Corff’s mottled whiskey. Karl had long since taught Fenris that not every mage wielded the same power, the same specialization, that a man’s instincts and his gifts were not _always_ the cause of his poor decisions. And there was reason for the special dispensation he gave _this_ mage—because what they shared was stronger than what they did _not_ share. He had his instincts, same as any. Perhaps this was his final rebellion, the one he needed to free himself of Danarius at last.

Fenris breathed out, slowly.

‘I do not know,’ he admitted. ‘I…have not tried.’

Anders’s fingertips hovered just above the skin. Fenris traced the shape of the _F_ against his wrist another time, each sharp corner and blunt end made of deadened nerves and tortured flesh. It was permission. The balance made sense.

And so Fenris braced himself for pain.

For the second time, pain didn’t come. Instead, he felt a warmth, a tickle along the false _vallaslin_ , as Anders’s forefinger dropped against it. A little flicker of light, coaxed forth from the magic Fenris had so learned to hate, sparked beneath, and followed Anders’s touch as it traveled, very slowly, along the back of Fenris’s arm.

He took a steady course, tracing each white-hot vein as it scrolled into the next, moving upward to the elbow. There, he turned to the softer, more sensitive flesh on the other side, where the lyrium ran parallel to Fenris’s other veins. He did not say _more natural_ because he did not think of them that way; he certainly didn’t understand their impulses or their capabilities half so well, and that was where he left things, watching Anders mirror the touch that _he_ , in a moment of impulse, had sought to initiate.

Finally, Anders came to rest before a slim strap, the binding of Fenris’s stiff leather vambrace. Heat shot beneath the buckle, but it was nothing Anders caused, no little tease or torment. At no point did it ache the way Danarius suggested, all those many years, each subtle manipulation of his fortune in Fenris’s flesh. And sometimes, less subtle, just a reminder at the end of each day, the body Fenris did not know and could not always control.

Fenris was and was not surprised to learn it was not a necessity of his condition, but rather a possibility. Danarius’s cruelty always lay in convincing the world of some inevitability in probability. His enemies only ever saw one potential end, and that prediction caused their downfall as much as any other, more tangible skill.

Fenris huffed, a noise to commemorate the moment. Anders rubbed a little circle against his skin—his _skin_ , not the lyrium—and began to retrace his steps, this time over the skin itself, between the slim white veins. Fenris’s breathing came slower, almost sedate as he watched the passage of slender, pale fingers, doing what Fenris himself had never dared. He imagined this was the sort of impulse that had once led Anders to attempt escape—seeing the lay of the land before him, choosing to _act_ instead of turning away.

It was intoxicating. Fenris should have indulged more in Corff’s swill, that he might have dulled his senses somewhat against this unexpected onslaught. He’d started it—Fenris had to remind himself of that, marveling anew each time he remembered it. He hadn’t invited Anders into his home, but he’d invited _this_ , an exchange of intimacies far greater.

It was a contradiction in terms. He couldn’t grasp it, no matter how he twisted his mind into knots.

A flicker of movement caught Fenris’s attention. It was Anders, his eyes lifting from Fenris’s arm to Fenris’s face at last. They were kind eyes, Fenris thought, distantly, warm as pale wood in the sun. He’d never had the inclination to notice such details about another, not even with Hawke, not even in the early years. There was only Danarius, and everyone who was _not_ Danarius, one or the other, leaving little room for any other distinctions.

It wasn’t fair to Anders. Not really. Fenris should have represented some hope for the future; he was meant to be a free man—not a shining example, but at least living proof that it _meant_ something to escape. Once a slave did not mean _always_ a slave. But he did not know the way of it.

 _You’re over-thinking things,_ said a voice in his head. Isabela, sultry and soft, the night she’d crawled into his window and threatened to make good on all her flirtations. _I know how you feel about healing, but there are all sorts of things one person can do for another to make them feel…better. Why don’t you let me show you my version of magic, hmm?_

He hadn’t understood her meaning then. Fenris wasn’t entirely certain that he understood it _now_ , in all its intricacies. What he knew was that Anders was touching him, meandering with idle purpose across his skin, and that it was the first initiative _he’d_ taken for himself. The significance was not lost on Fenris.

‘Anders…’ he murmured, catching himself before using the epithet that came more easily to him. _Mage,_ as he referred to Karl. _Mage_ , a simple word, that on his tongue meant everything.

Anders looked up, his expression curious in place of the wariness Fenris had grown used to seeing. Whether that could be attributed solely to the free-flowing liquor from the Hanged Man remained to be determined.

His lips were parted, mouth round and pink, chapped at the corner where he was always chewing at it. He was rather badly in need of a shave, something Fenris himself had never been given cause to consider. There was a particularly rough-looking patch of hair at the corner of his jaw; Fenris reached out to touch it, another gesture, another choice. The soft, rasping sound of his gauntlet against Anders’s cheek was soothing somehow—like the noise Varric made when he rubbed his chin in thought, searching for the right turn of phrase to shore some meaning in its proper berth.

Warmed by the unexpected familiarity of the moment, what they did and did not share, Fenris allowed his action’s momentum to carry him forward—the same as when he ran, drawn forward by some unseen force—before he covered Anders’s mouth with his.

Anders stilled beneath him, although Fenris could taste the heat from his mouth, tainted with Corff’s sour whiskey. He ran his tongue over the upper edge of Anders’s teeth, fingers slipping to grasp the back of his neck. Anders’s breathing hitched in his throat. His fingers moved in careless whorls over the underside of Fenris’s wrist; his lips twitched, but ultimately remained motionless, even as Fenris felt him move closer.

It was too much—or perhaps it never stood a chance of being quite enough.

Fenris was not skilled in this area; he did not know its gestures by rote, could not navigate its pitfalls and regroup when something went other than according to plan. The only correct course of action was a retreat—but those had never been his options, had never been his terms.

He reeled away swiftly, the lyrium pulsing with a sudden flare of bright light, as if to ward off any further pursuit. Anders would worry at the change; he’d imagine it was something he’d done, that solipsism in slavery that always, selfishly, presumed and predicted the self-inflicted _worst_. Better to assume the fault lay somewhere with him than to suspect the truth: that Fenris was no further along in this flimsy understanding of his own freedom; that he was in no position to teach _anyone_ how to live, when evidently, he didn’t know the way of it himself.

The only full room in the old house was its cellar, dank and dark and dripping in a far corner, and even that was a fullness Fenris chipped away at, night after night. This was no way to live, some would say—some _had_ said—but still he struggled with the burden of wondering: _was it his way?_

With no answer to the question—the one he felt, or the one he saw in Anders’s gaze—he put space between them, moving back toward the bed, that distance signaling the want, or the need, or the falsehood: this desire to be _alone_. As though a man knew himself better when no one was watching.

Either he did or he didn’t. Only time, not Fenris, would be able to tell.

He’d known already that Anders would not follow him there. Even Fenris couldn’t shift the course of his own momentum—was it commendable that a man set things in motion, when they were not what he wanted, nor what he’d planned?

It was something, _something_ he could call his, but now that he had it, he knew he did not want it. And the world he’d built was nothing beneath its bestiary of vague gestures, merely a nod to the trappings that meant so much to others, and absolutely nothing to him. What he had—as he’d told Hawke so many nights ago—was _nothing_ still, but nothing wasn’t what he wanted, this great breadth of nothing that he’d even _sought_ to own.

What he knew and what he created for himself—those stood apart, separate, across a great divide. The words he knew, and the words he spoke. That was the difference between a free man and a slave in the end. And though he hadn’t expected Anders to be the one to cross that distance—how could he, with so little experience, so little time?—it was still a sting beneath the skin, the truest _viper_ of them all, nestled there and shimmering in the lyrium heat, between muscle and flesh, as swift as blood and as brittle as bone.

*

Anders told no one what happened. There was no one to tell. In the night he traced the warmth over his lips, and the ache that shook his body was so terrifying he wished—briefly—that he never felt it at all.

Then, he wondered if that was entirely true. Perhaps the realization of that ache, and the manifestation of that fear, should have meant something to him, but the more he thought about it the less he slept. The less help he was to Karl, too, who caught him drifting off only once, the tip of his forefinger against the curve at the corner of his mouth—but once was more than enough. Or rather, it was too much; it meant the difference between pleasing someone and making them angry. Eventually, anger would come. Someone else’s anger was the only constant—their disappointment, too, because they never learned to stop expecting something else.

Anders had simply learned to stop expecting at all.

Sometimes, at night, he heard the sounds Fenris made while shifting and turning in his bed. Neither of them slept well any longer. Neither of them slept well to begin with—and that, more than anything, was the reason why Anders never found himself in some other bed, in some other room, in some other, separate part of the house. That, and the corpse that remained, the bundle of bones down by the first floor landing.

In the Imperium, one learned not to discount the power of any so-called dead thing. Re-animation was the latest fashion.

That was neither here nor there—or perhaps it was there, but not here—and in any case, Anders told no one what happened; he never had to wonder if Fenris wouldn’t do the same. Of course he would. It was the one bright light in the midst of so many other, darker things, each shadow passing across the next until they all became one larger shadow together, but soon it would dwindle again, down into nothing, the more they pretended it hadn’t been real.

Isabela teased him—a strange thing—when they swept the docks one night, Anders still surprised he was invited to attend. Fenris, Hawke, and Isabela—and Anders, too, all four of them together, creeping through the crates and barrels of that afternoon’s imports, all a part of something bigger.

When Isabela caught him staring across the water—toward the tower in the Gallows, yes, but mostly at the moonlight glittering between the lazy waves—she cocked her hips and clucked, softly, while Anders felt Fenris watching.

Watching Isabela? Or watching Anders?

He told himself it didn’t matter.

‘That’s the way _I_ used to look at the sea, you know,’ Isabela said, inspecting the dirt under a nail, but not bothering to clean it. It was the little things, really, that set them apart—that set Anders apart from everyone. What they chose not to do, rather than that they couldn’t choose. ‘…Not that this little spit of water _counts_ as the ocean—except of course it _does_ , doesn’t it? In all the ways that matter.’

‘Isabela, are you drunk?’ Hawke asked.

‘Do the Qunari love their Tome of Koslun?’ Isabela replied, then winced. ‘Blast. I think it might be _too soon_ for that joke.’

‘It is,’ Fenris muttered darkly. Anders felt a slim trickle of curiosity, tempered by distance—the knowledge that they were discussing something he hadn’t been a part of. Where they had memories and a history, he had nothing.

That wasn’t strictly true. He had memories, too, of the warmth on his lips, although even that was beginning to fade, simple recollection too flimsy to sustain it over so many days.

‘Oh, _honestly,_ ’ Isabela said, with a roll of her eyes and an accompanying roll of her hips. She enjoyed flirting with Fenris, though Anders had noticed—so it seemed—that Fenris didn’t flirt with her in return. ‘Not you, too. I came back, didn’t I? It’s a mistake I learned from. Acting all serious about it won’t change the fact that it _happened._ All anyone can do is move on, and hope for better things next time.’

‘You know, that _almost_ made sense,’ Hawke said. Anders watched Fenris roll his eyes. ‘…Are you _sure_ you’re not just trying to duck all the blame?’

Isabela laughed, low and throaty. Somehow, she’d managed to become more than just the sum of her errors. And so she was forgiven, if only because she forgave herself.

Later that night, so deep into darkness it was nearer to dawn, it began to rain. Anders woke to the sound and the feeling, a distant patter and the droplets on his cheek and chin. When he rubbed his hand along the stubble it was rough, not at all like the smooth touch of Fenris’s hand learning the shape of an old scar.

Tentatively, he reached down, finding that same shape, tracing it with his own fingers. They were gentle, too, in a different way, but his own touch didn’t elicit the same reaction—the thrill of unpredictability wasn’t there, and neither was the fear.

Yet, Anders told himself, he wasn’t afraid of Fenris. Not the way he was meant to fear a master.

The fear had no name. The rain came down harder. At last Fenris stirred, and sat up, and huffed an angry breath into the heavy air.

‘It’s raining,’ Anders told him, voice not quite hushed, so that it could be heard over the thundering droplets now landing against the bare floor and rug, and the distant rumble of the clouds.

‘I can see that.’ Fenris stirred beneath his covers, throwing them back as he stood. Anders could see him clearly in the dark, the faint glow of his tattoos as the lyrium thrummed to life. He was unarmed and _unarmored_ : hands small and bare without the curved metal of his gauntlets, tattooed chest naked to the elements.

It stood to reason that even Fenris wouldn’t sleep in such uncomfortable armor, but Anders had never seen him without it. He stared, struggling to sit up only when he realized Fenris was approaching him, instead of stalking off to find somewhere better—drier, quieter, _alone_ —to rest.

‘Get up,’ Fenris suggested, his voice still rough with sleep. Anders shifted, fingers tight against his dampening blanket as he stood. His body felt stiff; the joint in his knee creaked, and he paused to rub it, an idle thing, something he wouldn’t have bothered with a few weeks ago.

‘I thought you were asleep,’ he said, spurred by the sudden need to explain himself. He didn’t want Fenris to think of him as a burden, someone too feeble-minded to move himself out of the rain once it began to fall.

But what use were instincts to someone who failed to act on them?

Fenris blinked, then lifted his gaze to the hole in the ceiling. Cool rain spattered down through the rotten roof, beading on his face and trickling over his chest and shoulders. When white fabric was soaked through, it became transparent—but the rain only turned Fenris’s hair to silver, and the lyrium beneath his skin did not disappear. Instead, it burned even brighter still.

‘Give me your blanket,’ Fenris said, regaining his focus. He moved away to fetch one of the chairs from their reading table, and dragged it over one-handed. Despite Anders’s curious gaze, he climbed up to stand atop it, then held his hand down for the coverlet, waiting.

He was going to stretch it over the hole, Anders realized. It was a simple enough solution, patching what needed to be patched—something that _he_ should have figured out earlier, the easiest means to an uncomplicated end. Anders had missed something obvious, and now they were both suffering the consequences.

It wasn’t a one person job. That was what had held him back.

‘Wait,’ Anders said, handing over only half the blanket, then stepping back to stretch it wide. ‘Let me. I can help.’

At a height, Fenris’s features were awash in moonlight, no longer obscured by the shadows of the house. The harsh lines of his face had softened; his wide green eyes offered nothing but puzzlement and gratitude, a handsome combination.

 _Elfroot,_ Anders thought. Fenris’s eyes were the exact color of elfroot leaves, growing undisturbed in the Fereldan summer sun. It didn’t settle Anders’s stomach to be near him, but there were other cures it offered, other wounds in need of salving.

Together, they moved as swiftly as they could to cover the hole. They had no hammer and no nails, but there were sharp bits of broken rafter and all manner of nooks and crannies where the soft edge of a sheet might be crammed in and fastened. The fabric was light, so it didn’t need much in the way of support. Once or twice, Anders became distracted watching Fenris work, the look of concentration wrought over his features—as though he was taking this as seriously as a battle against blood mage raiders—and the shift and clench of his muscles as he leaned forward, tugging the length of the sheet tighter to block out the rain.

That same rain pattered down the back of Anders’s neck, beneath the high collar of his robes. Anders shivered. Fenris looked up and met his gaze.

They were both soaked now, straight through the skin, but not yet to the bone. Anders shifted underneath the tent, bowing his head, careful not to disturb anything. The balance was precarious. Neither of them knew the cleverest of knots. At any moment, it might fall, and what they’d mended wouldn’t be mended anymore.

‘I did not see the purpose in such a thing before,’ Fenris began, not hesitant, just slow. ‘Yet now, I think I do.’

His tattoos hummed, an isolated song. The closer Anders came to him, the more it felt like a piece of the Fade dragged into the waking world, echoes of a quiet dream no longer completely silent. Anders dripped onto the floor, already wet, and Fenris made no move to brush away a stray bead of sweat and rain that trickled down the length of his throat, shaping the curve of the flesh, along the bob when he swallowed, into the hollow at his collar-bone, running alongside the line of lyrium.

Anders reached forward to touch it when it finally stilled. He saw Fenris hold his breath. Anders reminded himself of the little things he knew: his own name, in a manner of speaking; the strength of his magic, all he had left to that name; what that magic was, and the shape it made, its proper form.

He was a healer.

If he had room for regret, then he had to understand: what he regretted most was not healing Fenris while he still had the chance. He could blame circumstance all he liked, but when he looked back on those dark evenings, Fenris’s ragged breathing in a distant cell, he could blame only himself.

‘It cannot be comfortable on that bench all night,’ Fenris said at last, his voice lower than before. It rumbled like thunder, too, deep in his chest instead of far-off across the dismal sky.

When he stepped down off the chair—easy and graceful, barely making any sound—he offered one empty hand for Anders to take, to help himself down. It was littler than all the other little things, but Anders took it all the same, lyrium hot against his fingers, another pulse trembling beneath.

*

A free man made his own bed, but he did not, Fenris discovered, have to lie in it alone.

His friends were an example of that, insofar as he actually had them. They remained in some familiar semblance always, a haphazard collection of trust and laughter, quick tongues, bad jokes. But they were only one part of this equation, the sum of a man that made him equal to any other, that allowed him to feel grateful even when he was weary.

Anders sat on the edge of the bed. Fenris recognized the nervous habit he had of pushing his knees together, with his hands flattened between them. It was to hide the scar on the inside of his wrist—Fenris knew that at last—and so it made sense. But at length, Anders’s posture eased, and drew himself backward over the sheets, damp robes and all, without question. The flat pallet beneath them was older than Fenris knew, and smelled of dust amidst the weave of the sheets, of old feathers and, indeed, of rain.

‘It is not the most comfortable of beds,’ Fenris muttered. ‘But it is at least _a_ bed. Not a corner, not a bench, and not a chair.’

All things, he tried to say, had their purpose. Only it came out sideways, without the proper meaning.

That ghost of a smile lingered on Anders’s lips despite the failure, not because of it. It was sad, melancholy, afraid of its own shadow; and in the shadows that surrounded them, it was little wonder it saw reason to be afraid. Finally, Fenris could tolerate it no more, that smile and what it could have been, and he reached his fingers to the rough surface of Anders’s cheek, thumb upon stubble, though he asked for nothing more than he gave, his knuckle pressed into the corner of Anders’s mouth.

No clap of thunder followed, save for what faded in the sky. Fenris could do this now, because it was his choice; hatred and pain were Danarius’s gift, but stubbornness was entirely his own.

Anders turned his head, just barely. Each motion was separate and distinct, the actions of someone waking from a deep sleep, forgetting—if only briefly—how his muscles worked. This was why Fenris never slept heavily—that, and the probability of some future attack. After all, the windows were broken in, and half the locks on the doors didn’t work.

Guarding was what came readily to him, a defense born of offense—or perhaps it was the other way around. All he knew was that the two were bound like his blood and the lyrium. On the best of days untangling them was at least unnecessary, alongside impossible.

‘I’m sorry,’ Anders said.

Fenris wondered, for a brief moment, if he’d voiced his thoughts, or if this was the same idle pity—unfocused and uncalled for—that everyone showed him, at one point or another, whenever they learned of the nature of his affliction, the agony of his life. He did not want those apologies. He did not _need_ them.

‘For what?’ he asked, attempting a question instead of outright refusal. But in the end, they sounded just the same.

Anders’s fingers curled inward, holding onto nothing. For the first time, Fenris experienced a personal disappointment—realizing he wanted Anders to touch him, while Anders frustratingly did _not_. No matter how slight, no matter how careful—just the craving of magic against his skin. A gentle magic; a _soft_ one. It meant a great deal to confirm what lessons he’d already learned—but then, Anders was more than just an example. More than a parable, too. He was a man, and this want was a physical one, and Fenris could no more satisfy it than he could bring himself to accept waiting for satisfaction to come.

‘I didn’t help you,’ Anders said, licking his cracked lips.

Fenris wracked his brain, trying to divine Anders’s meaning. All he could think was that Anders _had_ helped; they’d performed the necessary adjustments with the sheet together, even though Fenris had been set on doing it himself, and what more was there to achieve?

‘What?’ Fenris asked, finally defeated not by the complexity, but by the simplicity of the statement.

‘Hadriana,’ Anders clarified. His face twitched, but all Fenris could feel was the weary flare of a half-banked fire that lashed through him at the name. He’d killed her himself—he’d felt her heart beat its last in the palm of his hand—but she haunted him still, to this day. Perhaps that was a fitting punishment for going back on his word, taking her life when he’d promised her mercy. The ghosts that remained, that would always remain. ‘She hurt you, and I didn’t help.’

‘But you did,’ Fenris said. Disagreement always came easily to him. Anders leaned his face against his fingers—Fenris spread them to cup the scruffy line of Anders’s jaw against his bare palm. ‘You are a healer—you performed to the best of your abilities. I was not…entirely grateful for it then, but that does not detract from the offer itself.’

Anders shook his head, turning his face against Fenris’s palm. His lips tickled against the skin, muttering something unintelligible. Fenris forced the quick cut of his anger aside, the urge to tell Anders to speak up if he wanted to be heard. Sometimes—most times—it wasn’t that easy. He kept his hand still against Anders’s face, supporting him where mere assurances could not.

‘What?’ he repeated.

‘It wasn’t enough,’ Anders murmured, eyes downcast. ‘It might have been my best, but it didn’t mean much in the end. I couldn’t make a difference.’

Fenris felt the words as a warm gust of air on his palm, but the force of them struck him like a blow. It was clear from his bent neck and slumped shoulders that this was what Anders truly believed—and what was worse, Fenris had let him.

That was not right. It did not seem _just_.

‘I remember you,’ Fenris said, fingers scratching against the stubble at Anders’s cheek. He marveled silently at the feel, a foreign experience, how it could be so rough and yet so pleasant all the same. ‘You brought me food.’

The words were insufficient. Anders did not know— _could_ not know—what it meant that he alone had remained, where so much remembrance was now lost.

But if Anders did not understand, it was Fenris’s duty—or his pleasure—to make him see.

‘ _I_ think,’ Fenris began, then swallowed. What did he think? Anders’s eyes found him in the dark, anxiety faltering beneath simple curiosity—he trusted Fenris, enough to _want_ to hear what he was thinking. What was more, the pair of them sitting in a worn-out bed, beneath the sound of rain spattering against the spare cotton blanket, Fenris realized that _he_ trusted _Anders_ to hear it.

And there was good reason. The man had never once sought the upper hand with Hadriana by resorting to blood magic; he was not like the other mages Fenris had known in Tevinter, despite experiencing the evils of that place for so long. But they were linked by more now than their mutual past—a mutual decision to color their actions..

‘There is always _more,_ ’ Fenris said at last. ‘One looks back and sees only his follies.’ After all, he had not intended to run, had not wanted to slay the Fog Warriors, had not thought even once about the people he left behind to suffer _their_ fates alone. He waited, and heard Anders move in the dark against the sheets. ‘Yes. There is always _something_ to look back on. Yet in my experience, those who _need_ to improve never ask _themselves_ those wretched questions. It’s men like Hawke—men like you—who find the words.’

‘…Men like me,’ Anders repeated. When he moved forward, all at once—one hand at Fenris’s hip, the other against his shoulder—the lyrium beneath Fenris’s skin hummed, but not in warning.

It was calling to Anders, responding to the magic in his touch, and the palm that fit neatly against the cool curve of Fenris’s shoulder.

Fenris thought about Hawke; Aveline; Guardsman Donnic; Bethany and Karl. People who were softhearted, or kind, or _decent_ , but never to the point of shirking their duty. He admired them, in his own way. Now those burgeoning feelings could be attributed to someone new, someone with rough cheeks and wet hair. They took on new meaning, changing as they grew.

‘Men like you: those who accept nothing less than what they know is right,’ Fenris confirmed. ‘Which is no less than what they _deserve._ ’

It seemed that years of listening to Aveline speak—what little she did say, compared to the others—had paid off at last. There was more to be said, but Anders made a soft noise in his throat, then surged forward before Fenris could continue, his hand tightening where it rested above muscle and bone. Fenris was barely prepared when their lips met, Anders’s mouth crushing against his inelegantly, with a sharp clack of teeth.

He didn’t allow his lack of preparation to become hesitation, or at least resemble it. He knew what it was to offer this and be met with nothing, and he understood the nuances and subtle cues that came with a simple kiss, given freely to someone for no other reason than the sheer want of the thing. His fingers curled harmlessly in the front of Anders’s robes, dragging him forward—pulling him closer, instead of pushing him away.

But his desire was not entirely selfless. Anders’s mouth against his—lips parting, his entire body jerking when Fenris swiped his tongue between them—fed a hunger he hadn’t known he was suffering, one that couldn’t be cured with a bit of bread hidden up a healer’s sleeve. Fenris drew Anders forward on the bed, the fire in his skin a part of him for once, and not due to the foreign element—one that burned for its own reasons, never at Fenris’s beck and call. The muscles in his stomach jumped as Anders’s hand passed over them. But Anders merely changed his course, thumb tracing the edge of a thick, curved line as it splayed over Fenris’s stomach, dipping below his navel.

Fenris groaned into his mouth. He spread his legs, which gave Anders room to crawl closer between them. Anders murmured something—another question perhaps, his breath warm against Fenris’s lips.

‘Touch me,’ Fenris said. It was the only response he knew, yet it was also the first he’d really known it.

Anders did as he was told, but this time, Fenris accepted it. After all, it had begun as an impulse between them, and any free man was allowed to ask something of another—too look him in the eye, and _need_ what he needed.

It was better, the sooner he learned it.

 **EPILOGUE**

After a busy day in the clinic, Karl said, the only potion to heal a healer was—if you could believe it—what Corff was selling. It wasn’t a cure Anders knew, but it seemed convincing enough, and it worked for all the others: red-faced, laughing, choking as they swallowed too much, pounding one another on the back to keep their friends from drowning. Half the cure seemed to be in epithets hurled against mothers, and when Anders listened to them—sometimes, if they were actually funny, which they rarely were—he found himself laughing into his whiskey.

According to Isabela, Fenris joined them at the Hanged Man more often now. ‘He doesn’t have to say why,’ she said, flicking a lock of hair back over her shoulder, setting her dirty boots right in front of Anders’s face on the table. ‘Doesn’t he know _I_ see everything?’

‘Except when you’re cross-eyed drunk,’ Hawke replied.

‘Which just so happens to be a few hours short of always,’ Varric added.

Anders waited between them, crushed like the others, packed into the narrow table, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder. They paid him no extra mind. They never apologized when they jostled in and out. Every time the door opened, a gust of Lowtown air blew in, and Anders always looked, always caught Varric—a master of watching other people watch things—winking at him.

When Fenris did join them, Anders felt a telltale flush rise in his cheeks, coloring the tips of his ears. Isabela coughed, but cheerfully excused herself so that Fenris would have room to sit down at Anders’s side. He promptly refused to drink the whiskey Hawke ordered specially for him, sliding it neatly across the table to where Anders’s tankard sat, already empty.

‘It tastes of fish,’ Fenris said. ‘I would not drink this for any reason but the immediate need to expel poison from my body—and even then it would be a _contradiction in terms_ to do so.’

Later, Anders wondered if the taste in his mouth bothered him, while Fenris drew him into bed. They both fell against the old mattress together, in a tangle of limbs, neither on top of the other. They lay still for a while, knees touching, hearts hammering, while Anders did what he did best, little healing touches that soothed both of them in turn, fingers tracing each line along Fenris’s naked body. At the end of it, Fenris was hard, and Anders aching, and they kissed again, before Anders voiced his worries.

‘It does not bother me,’ Fenris replied. ‘You choose to drink it, just as I choose not to. The taste reminds me of those choices.’

‘That we have the freedom to drink terrible whiskey?’ Anders asked, fingers slipping between Fenris’s legs at last. He bucked his hips, then shuddered, and Anders buried a pink grin against his neck, where he’d feel it. Fenris liked it when he smiled. Anders liked it, too.

‘…Or the freedom to refuse,’ Fenris replied.

It was a simple metaphor, and perhaps not one that was entirely universal, but all that mattered was that _they_ understood it now. And what Anders liked most about his freedom wasn’t foul-tasting whiskey, or the fact that Fenris was glad to go on kissing him—although that was a part of it, a part of the currency, the simple idea that he would no longer be spending it alone.

 **END**


End file.
